President's Office Showcase:
Robert Creamer

Robert Creamer has been a professional photographer for over thirty years. His work had has been widely exhibited and published. Over the last ten years Creamer has pioneered the use of utilizing large format flatbed scanners to capture his images. His early scanner work was presented at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in 2006 followed by a tour of the work across the United States overseen by the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition Service. As an honorary Visiting Scholar to the Smithsonian he has scanned numerous natural history items from their vast collection.

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Over his thirty-year practice Creamer has investigated a number of techniques and followed various avenues of interest but one constant has remained—his fascination of botanicals. Though flowers are often the subject of his work, their taxonomy is of little interest to him— instead he is fascinated with their morphological transformation, the process of aging and decay—the passing of time that is inherent in the world of nature.

 

It is in this contemplative spirit he observes and captures profound decisive moments—chronicling key traces of the cycles of life. In the artist’s work moist blossoming flowers twist into sculptural forms, highly saturated pigment inherent in seductive blooms radiates and glows, then fades—eventually wilting, then crackling apart into stately grays and umbers as the botanicals transition from perceived perfection to deterioration and disintegration, at times even on to cremation. Creamer’s work challenges traditional precepts of beauty by embracing the allure of ecstatic loveliness, then calling it into all into question. Here the flower is not about the decorative. It is about the moment, the transient, the metamorphosis. The artist feels a strong kinship with the spirit of Stieglitz and his “Equivalents” series which holds that abstract forms, lines, and colors can represent corresponding humanistic inner states and emotions —feelings that can be transferred between the artist/creator to the receptive viewer.