River, Connecticut 2015

Elina Brotherus took this photograph, River, Connecticut, most likely with a digital camera. What I like about this work is how the composition and tonality draw me into a contemplative and maybe even therapeutic experience. The artist stands in the river, hat on, in her dress. The scene is calm, but the moving water offers a sensation of movement. She is immersed, alone and pensive, in the chilly flow of the river. I imagine Brotherus making this work, thinking about the history of landscape and the way people have interacted with nature. I think about the women artists who came before her, like Agnes Martin, Yayoi Kusama, and Ana Mendieta, who use natural settings as a site for working through their ideas about life, death, the body, and place. The image becomes an exercise in seeing, feeling, and thinking about what it means to be human, now. Like painters do.