NANCY LEMBERGER

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Art has always been a part of my life but it wasn’t until I retired from a long teaching career, that I could intentionally focus, and develop my craft. I photograph people, dance, nature and the objects that life presents. I Started with an instamatic, then a SLR camera, later a digital point and shoot and now the iPhone. The iPhone frees me to photograph everywhere: at home, bike-riding around NYC, and on my travels.

I experiment and edit my photo captures to explore the mundane, serendipitous, and the contrasts of nature and urban environments.  I make the familiar strange by changing and distorting reality using techniques of close focusing on part of the whole, or by moving the camera while shooting and by digital editing.  What “speaks to me,”  in an image, is the morphing of objects into humorous figures, animals, etc. The resulting images are surprisingly abstract, surreal, unrecognizable, and at times painterly.

As a collaborating artist member of Art Lives Here, NYC, my work was published in the 2024 Volume 1 catalogue featuring 71 artists. I have recently expanded my circle of arts activities to work collaboratively with other members of Art Lives Here that focus on climate activism. Together we organized performances and demonstrations on Earth Day (2024), at the Peoples’ March (2025) and the 2023 & 2024 Trashion Show workshops which culminated in publicly presented Trashion (fashion) shows.