Raissa Venables


Raїssa Venables is an American photographer.

Background and education

Venables was born in 1977 in New Paltz, New York, USA. From 1993 to 1997, she attended the Arts Student’s League in New York City, concentrating on the Anatomy for Life Drawing. In 1999 she received a BFA in Photography and Ceramic Sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute. She received a master's degree in photography at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College and a MFA in Photography in 2002.

Philosophy and style

Venables' photographs deal with planar relationship, passage of time, motion, and perceptual fields, blurring the realm of the real world with the imagined one.
Venables is influenced by Early Renaissance Flemish painters like Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and Robert Campin, particularly with their usage of colour and lighting. Venables' work is also influenced by the neo-cubistic approach to splitting and dissolving an object or space before reassembling them together. Curators make the comparison of Venables’ work with thematic perspective found in Medieval art, in which objects are arranged in accordance to their spiritual values as opposed to their natural ones.
Matthias Harder, director of the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin, wrote about the artist’s reason for taking this approach: “Venables’ real intention is to open up unfamiliar perspectives and to transform real spaces into imaginary ones with realistic traits.”

Publications

Solo exhibition catalogues

Venables' work is held in the following permanent public collections: