Casey Rae
Artist’s Statement:


My friends did not understand why I would go north in the winter. I’ve always loved snow, although in Missouri it seems we get less and less each year. In 2006, while searching for snow in the upper peninsula of Michigan, I was quite surprised to find Lake Superior transformed into a magnificent frozen landscape. The icy surface of the Lake seemed to go on forever, unbroken, like the never ending expanse of the Arctic tundra. I had an eerie feeling, as if I was on another planet. Only the sound of the wind was familiar. The shoreline had disappeared and the darkened sky against the bright ice enhanced the feeling of an alien world. I spent the day taking pictures at the edge of Lake Superior but I was not able to capture the feeling I had on first discovery.

I returned to the Lakes the following year with a more serious objective. I wanted to recreate photographically that haunting feeling of winter isolation that I had experienced. To do this the images needed to be large scale. I shot 4x5 transparencies, and to get as much detail as possible, I scanned the film on a high resolution scanner. I cropped the images just above and below the horizon line and printed them (very large) in order to convey the feeling of vastness of these Lakes. The resulting icescapes, printed on fine art paper, transcend the photographic medium with their other-worldly presence.

The works from 2007 and 2008 were published by Maryanne Ellison Simmons and Wildwood Press. It is her inspiration and collaboration that made this project possible.