CHROMATOPIAChromatopia features surreal images of Coachella Valley landscapes created with a camera sensitive to both visual and infrared spectrums, creating vivid color combinations in camera using various archaic filters in...
Chromatopia features surreal images of Coachella Valley landscapes created with a camera sensitive to both visual and infrared spectrums, creating vivid color combinations in camera using various archaic filters in front of the lens. The new series debuted in Problematic Palms at the Marks Art Center at the College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California. Per curator and art critic Shana Nys Dambrot:
Osceola Refetoff’s work with multi-spectral exposures creates arresting infrared images of iconic Palm Springs neighborhoods’ architecture, landscape design, and encroaching wild nature. The impossibly rich chromatic character of the work is in conversation with both Pop art and the technology of scientific survey; the assertive beauty they express contains the unease of invisible color, an inverted dance of naturalism and surrealism, and the seeds of a deeper consideration about the viability of putting a town in the desert in the first place. Lovely, sparkling, water-intensive, manicured, natural, unnatural, otherworldly, seductive, subversive—paradisiacal and problematic.