Vanessa is a visual artist living and working in Oakland, CA. Although the end result of most of her work is photography, she engages with drawing, painting and sculpture to create her images. She has received fellowships from Headlands Center for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony and Kala Art Institute. In 2014, Marsh was Artist in Residence at Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco. Her work can be seen at Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Julie Nester Gallery in Park City, UT and photo-eye Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.

©Vanessa Marsh, Landscape #17, from Everywhere All at Once

I remember as a child the first time I looked intently out into a starry sky. I was away at summer camp up in the San Juan Islands and we were sleeping outside in a field by our cabin. It was dark enough to see the Milky Way; so dense it looked like a large smudge of light across the sky. Our counselor explained that the light we were seeing took so much time and crossed so much space that the stars it was coming from may not even exist anymore. I don’t remember when I fell asleep that night, but I know it was awhile that I lay there staring up, my heart pounding, realizing the vastness. Looking back. I’ve identified those moments as my first, and so far my most intense, experience of the sublime. That intimate time with the night sky led to a life-long interest in the workings of the cosmos, the physics of light and photographic process.

 Within the series Everywhere All at Once and Falling I bring to form imagined landscapes and combine them with intensely starlit skies, highlighting both a personal as well as a collective experience of the world. The images are made through a personally developed process involving drawing and painting and darkroom technique. The work is intended to be a space for the viewer to contemplate their own personal place in the universe. Also, to consider how we understand the real and truth in contemporary experience. -Vanessa Marsh, Oakland, 2015

Everywhere All at Once
(personal photogramic techniques, 2013-2015)

©Vanessa Marsh, Landscape #1, from Everywhere All at Once

©Vanessa Marsh, Landscape #9, from Everywhere All at Once

©Vanessa Marsh, Landscape #10, from Everywhere All at Once

©Vanessa Marsh, Landscape #8, from Everywhere All at Once

©Vanessa Marsh, Landscape #21, from Everywhere All at Once

©Vanessa Marsh, Landscape #22, from Everywhere All at Once

©Vanessa Marsh, Landscape #7, from Everywhere All at Once

©Vanessa Marsh, Mt. Baker, from Everywhere All at Once

Falling
(all unique chromogenic photograms, 2014)

©Vanessa Marsh, Mountains 2, from Falling

©Vanessa Marsh, Mountains 4, from Falling

©Vanessa Marsh, Mountains 10, from Falling

©Vanessa Marsh, Mountains 11, from Falling