Valery Lyman - Utility Lines
Utility Lines
Valery Lyman
I’ve been fascinated by the utility lines in Cambridge for years. What impresses me is the chaos of them. Everything else in the city is so quaint, controlled, manicured, rich. But then right above in the tree line are the ones that got away. The only wild organisms left in Cambridge. They grow year by year upon themselves like living creatures, conglomerating fabulously, as students and professors in this very well-heeled community move in and out. Detritus of this neighborhood’s higher-ed induced transience, these creatures are also a pulsing force in the information ecology that underpins its success, sending feeding tubes into every window.
In framing, I resist the temptation to present strong geometrical shapes by isolating the structures. I want to show the weight, the entanglements, how they are alive, the haphazardness, the fire hazard, danger, mess.
Valery Lyman is an American documentary artist who is fascinated with the "real". Her photographs pay tribute to the exquisite, fleeting moments we all witness each day. To capture these as they unfold and hold them up for the seeing is her particular way of honoring life and her own peculiar way of loving. Her work is heavily contingent on wandering and immersion, and her public exhibits invite the viewer’s body into the experience. Valery's work has been featured in The Guardian, the LA Times, The Christian Science Monitor and numerous smaller art journals. She mounted 6 large public exhibits across the country from photographs and sound recordings made in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota. Valery was a fellow with the Visual Studies Department at Harvard from 2014-18. In 2015, she helped co-found AgX, a collaborative dedicated to photo-chemical and alternative filmmaking in Waltham, MA.
