Fire Island: Elemental
Denise Demong 03.29.2018 - 06.07.2018 Living Room Gallery
"Fire Island: Elemental" celebrates a nearby refuge where many New Yorkers travel to be braced or soothed--depending on their needs at the moment--by time spent in a magnificent natural environment.
Denise Demong's photographs are preoccupied with geometry-- the way the vista splits into blocks of color as one gazes into the distance--and with the exquisite, constantly shifting hue of the island light.
Her aim, she says, is "to capture the way Fire Island makes us feel." Visitors returning after time away quickly experience "a moment of recognition, a sense of both peace and exhilaration," Demong says. "I believe that those of us who love the island return again and again because we crave the emotional response evoked by the visual splendor and the scale of the sky and ocean."
Demong says she hopes her images speak to the revitalizing power of the connection between spirit and place and, by extension, to the need to treasure and preserve our wild places.
Fire Island, she notes, is a fragile barrier island, threatened--perhaps to the point of eradication--by the rising sea levels and increasingly fierce and frequent storms associated with global warming. "My photographs do not document the effects of climate change per se," Demong notes. "I like to think, rather, that they provide a compelling vision of how very much we have to lose."
