Growing up with an artist mother and scientist father, I’ve always been drawn to places where dream and reality meet. With my camera, scanner and computer, I conjure a world that exists somewhere in between the external world and a mind’s eye view. It’s a mixed world, where the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘beastly’ cross paths, and I feel the exciting trepidation of an adventure.
Susan Felter (b. 1945, Oakland) has been dreaming with machines for over 50 years. Her first major project Kid Dreams evolved out of a love for the fantasy-saturated films of Federico Fellini, and captures in black and white the serious world of make-believe.
In 1980 she won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, a grant that supported the making of The Rodeo and The Circus, in which Felter combined flash photography with extended exposure to create a dream-like version of reality. In the mid 1980s, at a time when “computer drawing” was still in the nascent stages as an artistic medium, she partnered with Engineering and Communications colleagues at Santa Clara University to purchase two computer systems for the college. Felter spent many hours after work experimenting with these magical new machines, which at the time could only create images under 1MB with 256 colors. Doodles led to Cartoons, which led to The Ancestors, a series of surreal ‘mashups’ between art history and old Hollywood.
As the technology advanced, she turned her eye toward the collision of nature and culture with Hunting & Gathering. Scouring liminal spaces like tide pools and urban gardens for specimens to cast in vivid digital montage, Felter conjures “post-natural ecosystems” that implicate both artist and viewer in that collision. Next came Digital Thicket, an exploration of the science fiction qualities that emerge from bending color spectrums to unnatural extremes, and her long-running series Surfaces, which reveals entire universes in the ancient stone of cultural sites around the world.
Felter’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, Festival D’Arles in Arles, France and the Otaru Museum of Art, Otaru, Japan. Her work lives in the collections of SFMoMA and the Bibliotheque Nacionale de France, among others, and has been published in several books, magazines and anthologies. Felter earned a BA in Psychology and Art from UC Berkeley, and an MFA in Motion Pictures from UCLA. She taught photography at Santa Clara University from 1983 to 2010.
This bio was adapted in part from a statement written by Lindsey Kouvaris, Santa Clara University de Saisset Museum Curator, on the occasion of Felter’s 2010 mid-career retrospective. To read additional writing about Susan Felter’s work, check out the links below.
Setterberg, Fred. “Visit with Susan Felter: Post Natural Ecology” Stretcher. 2007.