Gwen Laine regularly steps over photographic boundaries to make her art. For her latest series she chose a natural setting near water and welcomed the presence of wind creating movement, because both would contribute to complex reflected lighting. Each light-capturing negative composed a unique palette of colors from which Laine created new artworks by extending hues as single-pixel lines. Referencing the day and time the photo was taken, she plotted the jet stream over her location in Colorado and laid it over her negatives as a guide to select and order colors. Laine readily lost herself in the subsequent process of executing the sequence of parallel lines, building up tiny increments of 100 per inch over long periods of time — a marked difference from the 60thof a second caught on film.

Laine’s combination of traditional photographic methods and the resolution and scale afforded by current technology allows her to dive deep, pulling out seemingly infinite color nuances. By using straight, narrow lines, she emphasizes the relationship of one color next to another without sacrificing the intensity of any individual hue. The compositions are evocative luminous encounters in which gradation, contrast, and the coolness or warmth of hues suggest tonal variation or light-and-shadow relationships which resonate within us. Through her elaborate distillations of micro-environments, Laine provides both unmediated physical and visual experiences transmitted by colors in which all the senses are encoded, replacing distance with immersion.