After many years using a camera as a resource for printmaking, Kathryn Jacobi is exhibiting her first photographs in a series entitled DreamDance.

The fascinating images originated with pictures of her friend, the dancer and choreographer Joanna McDermid, who posed for Jacobi in her studio. As the work developed, Jacobi began to imagine the dance scenes taking place in landscapes. She began to seamlessly blend the dancing figures with dramatic landscape imagery: spectacular cloudy skies, wild tangles of limbs and branches, and highly-textured glimpses of grass, leaves and bark.

The formal compositional device of divided formats emerged as a way to suggest dualities of inside and outside, light and dark, the conscious and unconscious. Jacobi, who had used this stylistic method in several earlier artworks, now found endless compositional possibilities with digital imagery. She discovered digital imagery was a means to achieving greater compositional control and an enhanced sense of painterliness. The results are deeply spiritual and romantic.

Using her own large-format printer with archival inks and very high resolution, she experimented with layering, patterning and transformations of scale. As each DreamDance image became complete, she locked the file on it and committed to printing a limited edition of 15 signed and numbered copies. Then the files were destroyed.

Kathryn Jacobi divides her time between Santa Monica, California and Sechelt, B.C. Her work is strongly influenced by the Old Masters, particularly those of the Northern Renaissance. Jacobi has exhibited with the Diane Farris Gallery since 1993 and is well-established internationally for her paintings and prints.