Pulling out a true ‘strange wonder’ from a territory ripe with them, she lets the audience marvel at it. In her recent artistic installation, Fleming Jeffries shows the viewers of her work what they look at but do not see. So it is present yet absent.
The ‘Presence-Absence’ mixed media installation by Jeffries, a faculty member of Virginia Commonwealth University-Qatar (VCU-Q), at the on-going group exhibition ‘Strange Wonders’ at Mesheireb Museums explores the spectrum from the greenest spots in Qatar to the driest spots, both seen and unseen.
“An aspect of the natural world in Qatar that fascinates me is the connection between desert and water. The local ecosystem provides evidence of water in the arid landscape; ancient riverbeds at the highest elevation point, marine fossils in the desert and the stromatolites on sea-turtle beaches,” says Jeffries.
A counterpoint, she says, is the presence of indigenous, managed and built water-scapes. Her work thus tries to cover the entire breadth and width of the whole range in an artistic way.
A native of Washington, DC, Jeffries received an MFA in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design, and a BFA in Printmaking and BA in Russian from the University of Alaska Anchorage, as well as the Printer Training Certificate from Tamarind Institute of Lithography in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Her work has shown in the US and internationally and can be found in private and public collections, including the RISD Museum, the Corcoran Museum of Art, and the US Department of State’s Art in Embassies Program.
She has been awarded purchase prizes and residencies, including the Winter Fellowship at the Fine Art Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and Keyholder Residency at Pyramid Atlantic in Maryland.
Venturing beyond the restrictions of the wakeful mind and physical presence, Jeffries chooses subjects that investigate the complex relationship between people and the natural world.
In prints, drawings, and book-forms the artist›s work aims to present a meeting ground between natural forces and human technology in a series of metaphorical places.
‘Haunted Beach,’ a West Side Story of the intertidal zone, reveals private moments of gulls and seaweed, normally shielded from the human eye by the inaccessibility of sea and air. In an attempt to understand the puzzling line between artificial and natural, she includes representations of technology as a stand-in for human presence.
Her work ‘Hydrofantasies & Mechanomorphisms’ features six different hydrologic technologies, loosely based on existing technology, such as the proposed solutions for replenishing the Aral Sea and the question of using iceberg towing to supply freshwater.
Clouds are whipped into enticing ornamental terraces in “Cloud Garden,” in a discussion on cloud seeding and weather modification technology. And the project “Indigenous Trees of the Future” explores deforestation, reforestation and bio-mimicry.
The prints often favour hand-drawn techniques as a means to reinforce the connection to protected sanctuaries of the mind as well as to slow down the reading of the images.
The sense of visual disorientation between historical and future projections is exceptionally rich when using traditional techniques, such as intaglio printmaking.
Jeffries’ works on paper rely on drawing as a means to slow down the mind’s eye and opens bridges to the subconscious. Her interest in collaborative printmaking began as a student in Moscow Studio, Russia (now Hand Print Workshop International).
She completed the Printer Training Program at Tamarind Institute of Lithography in Albuquerque, New Mexico and worked on the writing and illustrations of The Tamarind Book of Lithographic Techniques.
She taught Printmaking, Drawing and Foundations at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia and American University in Washington, DC before joining the PAPR (Painting and Printmaking) faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar in 2013. The Strange Wonders exhibit represents a culmination of the artistic journey of the students, alumni and faculty and staff of VCUQatar.
This year’s exhibition was inspired by a vision set forth by Qatar’s new cultural icon, Msheireb Museums, which mandated that the works of art presented in ‘Strange Wonders’ 2016 derive from a theme of pioneering innovation, industrial development and growth and advancement.
This creative guideline is in keeping with the history of Company House during the period of the discovery of oil and the life of those pioneers who set the bases of the modernisation of Qatar.