Not just trees

Natasha Lavdovsky '09 is a visual arts concentrator through Program 2 in the Department of Art and Archaeology. She just completed her photography thesis, "In the Elements," currently showing in the Lucas Gallery in the Lewis Center for the Arts.

Q: How long have you been working on your show?

A: I began working on it last June. I received the Wolfen Award that allowed me to go to Peru for a project I thought was going to be about eroded man-made ruins. What struck me instead was the process of nature changing man-made structures, and I was more interested in the natural forms because the human ones were too overly manicured.

Q: What is the subject of your show?

A: Well, it's called "In the Elements", and it's mostly about the forms, textures and shapes that I find in nature. My photographs bring you into another world; they're an abstraction, not a narrative. This made it very difficult to decide what the show was about; I had no specific goal in mind. Over 10 months, I took a lot of different photos, but I noticed they have a lot of the same components; forms transcend geography.

Q: Are your subjects for the show only natural?

A: No, among my collection there is a photo of a concrete wall and a tennis court, so they aren't necessarily nature, but they express natural processes that shape the landscape. My photos are not just of trees.

Q: Where did you take most of the pictures?

A: I originally was a geosciences major, so through that department I was able to travel to Bermuda and Morocco. After switching back and forth three times, I finally settled on the visual arts concentration (Program 2) in the Department of Art and Archaeology. Over Intersession, I got a grant from the art and archaeology department to go to Arizona and New Mexico. Since then, I've just been printing. I took many photographs when I went back home to Victoria in British Columbia, where there are a lot of smaller islands. Of course, I have also been taking pictures throughout the year in Princeton.

Q: What is your favorite photograph that you ever took?

A: To be honest, the first one that comes to mind is completely different from those in my show. It is of an arctic fox pelt, which I found at my boyfriend's house. I'm a vegetarian, so it was a big deal for me to see that lying around, but the fur was so beautiful. I put it on top of a black leather jacket and exposed it so that everything was black except for the white furry form. It tricks your eye, because at first you don't realize what you're looking at. Then, when you look closer, you realize that it's a fox and that it's dead. I think that's really the point of my photos; I take something sad or something boring, and I make it beautiful. Even if you don't exactly know what it is.

-Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Isabel Schwab '11