WATER Exhibit Featuring Artist: William Nieberding

William Nieberding

"Le Reve" 11"x15" - William Nieberding 

William Nieberding is an assistant professor of Art Education at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. His photographs include traditional silver-based black and white portraits, landscapes, and figure studies as well as digital work. The image presented here is from a series exploring physical and intangible relationships to water. William also writes about art, photography, and the discourse of vision. This work takes a focus on phenomenology, and how different ways of seeing offer insight into contemporary understandings of photography. William holds a Ph.D. in Art Education from The Ohio State University, and masters in photography from Purdue University.

His statement:

"As beings of mostly water, we are continually drawn to contemplate our relationships with it. Le Rêve is part of a larger series of photographs that indulges in this contemplation through the picturing of bodies in and bodies of water. Begun in the late 1990’s, and shot on black and white film, this series continues to draw me as an artist. Contemporary images are recorded digitally, and film negatives are now re-envisioned in ink, rather than silver.

Creating the work offers for me a most direct and embodied reflection on our relationships to water. A certain meditative tension may be found working in open spaces made private by the early hour, by time of year, or by inclement weather; made private also by the isolating action of being singled out as photographer and subject. This relationship has been the basis of my work, the idea of the artistic act as a unique exchange of gazes and reflections."

Check out his work at Hera! Water Exhibition ends May 9th.