Ephemeral blooms

Arts Center hosts first major U.S. museum exhibit of photos by Nathalia Edenmont, who drapes models in fading flowers and vegetables to create metaphorical images

Photographer Nathalia Edenmont stands before Cousin Red, a model clad in many pounds of strawberries, in the atrium of the Arkansas Arts Center. “Nathalia Edenmont: Force of Nature,” 10 Edenmont prints, will be up through May 1.
Photographer Nathalia Edenmont stands before Cousin Red, a model clad in many pounds of strawberries, in the atrium of the Arkansas Arts Center. “Nathalia Edenmont: Force of Nature,” 10 Edenmont prints, will be up through May 1.

As an art student in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Nathalia Edenmont wasn't encouraged, and maybe wasn't allowed, to be creative.

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©Nathalia Edenmont/ARS, courtesy Wetterling Gallery/Nancy Hoffman Gallery

Nathalia Edenmont's "Deep in Thought".

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©Nathalia Edenmont/ARS, courtesy Wetterling Gallery/Nancy Hoffman Gallery

Nathalia Edenmont's "Baby's Breath".

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Russian/Swedish photographer Nathalia Edenmont poses between two of her portraits, hanging through May 1 in the atrium at Arkansas Arts Center.

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©Nathalia Edenmont/ARS, courtesy Wetterling Gallery/Nancy Hoffman Gallery

Nathalia Edenmont's "Renaissance".

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©Nathalia Edenmont/ARS, courtesy Wetterling Gallery/Nancy Hoffman Gallery

Nathalia Edenmont's "Deadlock".

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©Nathalia Edenmont/ARS, courtesy Wetterling Gallery/Nancy Hoffman Gallery

Nathalia Edenmont's "Tasty".

She studied art for 10 years, first in her native Yalta, on the Crimean peninsula (at the time part of Ukraine), and then at a Kiev state school for artists, and was one of the most talented students in her class, she says.

“Nathalia Edenmont:

Force of Nature”

Through May 1 in the atrium, Arkansas Arts Center, MacArthur Park, East Ninth and Commerce streets, Little Rock

Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday

Admission: Free

(501) 372-4000

ArkansasArtsCenter.…

"I did a lot of realistic painting, Comrade Lenin, Communist posters. Not so much fantasy. That was forbidden.

"I followed by the rule in everything, by the book." More creative classmates who strayed from the party line, so to speak, "went to mental hospital from time to time."

At 21, as the Soviet Union was crumbling, she slipped the leash and got out, through Poland, where she was authorized to travel, to Sweden, where she wasn't. Obtaining a visa in Poland without proper permission from her government branded her as a dissident and made her, at least for a time, an exile. She admits she still has regrets, even though she has been able to journey back since.

"I liked the Soviet Union. But I didn't like the system. And there wasn't enough food.

"It's my motherland. It's like, your mother can sometimes be difficult, but you love her anyway."

Edenmont's own mother and

father died while she was a teenager.

The move freed Edenmont to be more creative -- only that's not what she wanted at the time.

At 27, she enrolled as a graphic design student in the Forsbergs Skola in Stockholm; after three years, she had a degree, but she couldn't get a job.

"'Everything looks like art,'" she recalls potential employers saying to her. "'It's interesting, but it's not commercial.' I was looking at living in a park and sleeping on a bench."

She moved to Australia with an Aussie boyfriend. That didn't work out; she missed Sweden and felt she had left unfinished business there. She ditched the boyfriend and moved back to Sweden, "to look with different eyes."

A mentor, her graphic design teacher, suggested she should instead become an artist. She protested that she'd rather have a job and a salary. He encouraged her to create the "strange" images she was seeing in her head and photograph them. She protested that she didn't have a camera and didn't know how to use one. He brought her around to creating installations that he showed up to photograph, just for fun.

"That's how it started. It was the beginning of my career," Edenmont says.

That was in 2003. She started out using simple compositions -- a model, a drape, a piece of furniture or two -- on a black background in her Stockholm apartment. As her work has evolved, she now creates large-scale fantasies in portraits of models, expressionless and motionless, in "dresses" made from flowers, fruits and vegetables.

Ten of her life-size portraits, four of them not previously displayed anywhere, are hanging in the atrium of the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock through May 1.

She has exhibited in museums in Sweden, Russia and Germany; though she has shown her work at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in Manhattan's trendy SoHo neighborhood, this is her first major museum exhibition in the United States. As it happens, the gallery and the Arts Center have linked the exhibition to the Garden Club of America's Zone 9 annual meeting, which will take place in Little Rock in late April.

With a team of eight to 12, including two camera assistants (both professional photographers), a hairdresser and a dressmaker, she composes a vision and shoots it with a large-format Sinar camera using 8-by-10 Kodak film. Primarily she uses a 300mm lens, but occasionally uses a 240mm lens for close-ups or a 360mm lens to shoot from farther away. She has her film developed at a lab that pretty much is only serving her, because nobody else is using film these days.

It usually takes a whole day to compose a single "shot." She uses only existing light and creates no effects; her models appear to be lit from within.

"Nothing is manipulated," she insists. "Everything is intuitive and depicted with the [existing] lighting and through the camera, which I operate myself. My heart tells me the way I want it."

The focus of the camera is always on the human being, and she won't use makeup on the models -- the idea, she says, is to "show the soul." The model's expression is always calm -- sometimes that happens early, but more often it takes until the very end of an exhaustive shoot to achieve what she's looking for, because the models start out "energetic and happy: 'I'm here in the bushes,'" she says with a rare smile. "Slowly, they get pain, from having the wire around the body" -- there's a basic under-armature of chicken wire -- "or it takes a while to settle in the right place."

She has gone more to using professional models, who can generally "sit better, or have better bodies," which makes it possible for her to hang more vegetables on them. Occasionally, under pressure, however, even pro models throw up or faint, or something goes wrong with the camera, so she has to make sure she has the shot before that happens.

"It's very difficult, shooting; it's always between 'to be' and 'not to be.' The flowers, the vegetables, the lighting, the hair, the sharpness -- it's all a little bit of magic."

Edenmont says her portraits represent particular moods, and names them accordingly -- Consciousness, Deadlock, Deep in Thought. Other titles are more accurate reflections of what she depicts -- a model clad in a huge accumulation of strawberries is Cousin Red. A portrait of a child whom she envisioned as dreaming of a beautiful dress and creating flowers from her exhalations is called Baby's Breath. A model wearing a salad of green peppers, asparagus and other vegetables she has branded as Tasty.

And Edenmont expects her portraits to tell stories. Some of her portraits include birds or snakes -- one of the self-portraits in the collection is titled Eden. Sometimes the flowers she uses are wilted: "Since my childhood I have heard that a woman's beauty is like a flower, it passes quickly," she explains.

Flowers and the occasional egg yolk represent fertility, a central theme of her large-scale installations. "I lost my parents; I lost my ability to have children of my own," she says. "But in the photos, I create very much fertility. Flowering; the fruits, the vegetables, are like children." Her work bears fruit, one might say.

It's possible, though you might not think of it right away, to extrapolate just what goes into creating the installations: for example, two identical twin aides hauling 450 kilograms (more than 990 pounds, roughly half a ton) of vegetables up four flights of stairs (no elevator). Edenmont carries the image on her cellphone.

What the models actually wear she throws away after the daylong shoot (well, except for the carrots that her Asian-Swedish subject decided she wanted to take home to cook). Boxes of vegetables she doesn't use she gives away to neighbors. She certainly doesn't want to look at any of it the day afterward.

"I create all that in my living room," she says. "I don't want to get up the next day and be anxious about how much did I buy and how much did it cost. 'Are you so desperate for a masterpiece? How much did you pay?' I want to wake up the next day as though nothing had happened, that yesterday was just a dream."

Style on 01/31/2016

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