Sheila Metzner - Fine Art Photography Gallery

Notes on TIME LINE

A straight line is not always the shortest distance between two points, as Shelia Metzner well knows. Lines can "swirl and arch and curve and radiate between two points," she says. The mind is not a card catalog. Our memories and time lines shift and change with the firing of each neuron, creating networks of their own, where proper chronologies have no place. This "Time Line" portfolio is a 40-year retrospective of Sheila Metzner's career, coinciding with an exhibition in the Visual Arts Museum at New York City’s School of Visual Arts.

Born in Brooklyn, Metzner grew up poring over the encyclopedia (a salesman had left her family volumes A – E) and dreaming of one day seeing the kaleidoscopic splendor of the world with her own eyes. After a prolific career photographing fashion, portraits, and landscapes, thousands of shutter clicks have come together into this collection of photographs, in which Metzner has sought out correlations that are instinctual rather than linear.

Images of the Brooklyn bridge, taken from Metzner's apartment window, where she fixed a tripod and camera for six years, the curve of a woman's neck, and the silhouette of a single calla lily are all fixed points in the thoroughly mutable space of memory. These images, like Metzner, herself, are at once a record and an ever-changing experiment. "They are no longer what they are." She says. "Or what they were. But when seen together, they become something more. A mythical truth, I hope."