©Tobia Makover, Hiraeth installation at Visual Art Exchange-Raleigh

One of the great pleasures of attending a variety of portfolio reviews over the years is having the opportunity to experience a photographer’s work over time. I reviewed Tobia Makover’s encaustic photographs at Atlanta Celebrates Photography two years ago, and when I saw her work at the Click Photo Festival recently, I was blown away by the progression of her photography and her installation in the Sleight of Hand exhibition at the Visual Art Exchange in Durham, North Carolina. Sleight of Hand features photo-based object works “where each piece requires a physical action from the viewer to be fully experienced.  This art is made to be touched”.  The exhibition, running until the end of the month, features the one-of-a-kind assemblage and installation pieces and Tobia shares the walls with Addison J. Brown, Brooke Caudle, Heidi Kirkpatrick and Lori Vrba.

Tobia’s way of presenting images is more about the comprehensive whole than the singular. Like a giant self portrait of memories, ranging from insignificant to life changing, her installations speak to the metaphorical visual Rolodex of her life, where her diaristic work comes together in a delicate, but powerful telling of who she is. It is a fascinating and exciting way to experience photographs and I can’t wait to see more.

SLEIGHT OF HAND October 2017 from Lori Vrba on Vimeo.

A fine art photographer and mixed media artist, Tobia Makover creates visual discourse through timeless and emotiv imagery. Each piece starts as a photograph – the soul and spine of her work – then is layered with paint that is carved, torched, and preserved in wax and resin through an ancient encaustic process. The world of her work is one that encapsulates our memories, our childhood, our fantasies and fears. She resuscitates those moments in our life that were never photographed, but remain forever ingrained within us, waiting to captured and revived.

Internationally acclaimed, Tobia has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Les Ateliers de L’Image in St. Remy, France, PH-Neutro in Verona, Italy, the Griffin Museum in Boston, AIPAD in New York, and SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah. Her work is also included in the permanent collections of Museum of Contemporary Art in Atlanta, Georgia, Savannah College of Art and Design and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. She received her MFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and her BA in Sociology and Communications from the American University in Washington, D.C..

Tobia is a full-time artist who lives in Savannah, Georgia with her husband and two children.

©Tobia Makover, close up of Hiraeth at the Visual Art Exchange

©Tobia Makover, close up of Hiraeth at the Visual Art Exchange

What draws you to working in encaustic?

I started to work in encaustic 11 years ago.  I was frustrated because I could not afford to matt and frame the work I wanted in my show.  I had to edit the show down due to money instead of creative decisions.  I knew something had to change. 

I had never heard of the term encaustic but I knew painters used wax all the time. . .  that is when I started to experiment, research and work with wax every day ..  I never looked back.

©Tobia Makover, close up of Hiraeth at the Visual Art Exchange

©Tobia Makover, close up of Hiraeth at the Visual Art Exchange

©Tobia Makover, close up of Hiraeth at the Visual Art Exchange

©Tobia Makover, close up of Hiraeth the Visual Art Exchange

myself a memory

every. single. memory. flies.
a storage of long felt dreams
a catacomb of lost thoughts

flying through my brain
overwhelmed
love lost
heart full
fear

when feet do not touch the ground
empty air
internal hollowness

i crave a place where the birds will fly

of a time before
of a place not there

i try

to own the space, i have

if only for a second.

-Tobia Makover

©Tobia Makover, Nakazora installation at the Jepson Center in Savannah

Tobia Makover’s images are poetic.  They are cinematic.  They are artistic.  Hers is a timeless world, but not a dream world.  It is a world of memories collected and preserved.  Her images are our memories, our childhood, our fantasies, our fears.  They are moments in our life that no one was there to photograph. 

 The power of her work is that the audience is seduced inside their own memory bank.  We apply our personal selves and our personal stories to her images.  We feel strangely at home in her work.

We reside inside her shut doors and open hallways.  We feel the sands of time flowing in our face.  The millions of memories floating in our mind are floating in her mind as well and yet she has, sometimes painfully, reached inside and captured if only loosely the ones that we relate to.  The ones that remind us that life is made of magic and that time is an illusion. 

 More than seeing, it’s about feeling myself as memory. – Marcus Kenney

©Tobia Makover, The Bone Tree, part of Nakazora at the Jepson Center in Savannah 80″x80″

©Tobia Makover, Memory Box, size 8x8x3, mini installation of 20 cubes, in the collection at Museum of Contemporary Art in Atlanta

©Tobia Makover, Myself a Memory installation

©Tobia Makover, The Moving Wall, an interactive piece where viewer is allowed to move work and buy work right off the wall then place alternative piece where missing piece was ..

©Tobia Makover, Mother’s Bed, a fixed installation part of Paula Wallace collection

©Tobia Makover, Fort Pulaski, Barred

©Tobia Makover, Rooted

©Tobia Makover, Two Ships

©Tobia Makover, Womb