Like the Spice is pleased to present Synaesthesia: Nicole Stager, an exhibition of the artist’s gloriously colorful abstract photograms.

Taking literally the meaning of photography, drawing with light, Stager makes her elegant works in the darkroom, drawing some with handheld light sources, others use found objects as three dimensional negatives.

Emotionally evocative yet inherently mysterious, Stager’s work sits at the crossroads of several different artistic practices. In a process that combines the specificity of the photograph as document with the aesthetic history of abstract painting through the performative manipulation of light and color in real time, Stager induces a kind of trans-media synthesis rarely seen in work that is so simple in its beauty. Time, color, shape and line are all uniquely presented in Stager’s work.

Some of the first photographic images, photograms are cameraless images that have a far more poetic relationship to their subjects than traditional photography. In fact, the works in this exhibition have far more to do with the interaction of light, shadow and chemistry than with the objects that produced them. The resulting images become open to interpretation and conjecture. The uncertainty about true sources allows for a work that may remind one viewer of a childhood memory, another of a song from last summer, and another of the smell of burning leaves. Are the colored circles in a given work burns? Drops of blood? Streetlamps? They could be any of the above, or none.

Born in 1978 Wellsboro, PA, Nicole Stager holds a BS and MEd in Art Education and a BFA in Graphic Design and Photography from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. She is currently completing her MFA in New Media from the Transart Instituta at Danube University in Krems Austria. She has been showing her work for the past five years in New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, and California including solo shows at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York and Gallery 908 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Her work has been featured in Harper’s and Art Review Magazine. Stager has been teaching photography since 2002 and was recently awarded a Fullbright Teacher Exchange Scholarship which she will complete this winter at Brizham College in Brizham, England. This is her first solo show at Like the Spice Gallery.