Virge Lorents, Photography

Artist Statement

My images are rooted in the landscape surrounding my home, focused on my vegetable garden, flower beds, fields and woods, and waterbodies everywhere. The photos may be straightforward representations of reality, or reality is merely the first step in a series of experiments with a camera or an iPhone, or with lighting or a computer, or a combination of all of these.

Recent Awards, Honors, Newsworthy Activities

Earlier this summer, I created a body of work for an invitation-by-museum-director exhibition at the Slater Museum in Norwich, CT, called “Meadow Life," which focused on CT's beautiful landscape. I chose to highlight light pollution as a growing environmental issue. The nightscapes of primarily-rural eastern Connecticut are beautiful, yet there is evidence that light from new malls, casinos and subdivisions diminish the constellations my sea-faring father showed me when I was a child. My purpose was to encourage viewers to ask their towns' Planning and Zoning Commissions to add simple, inexpensive Dark Sky Initiative regulatory language to minimize further impacts on the night sky.

In early 2014, I had a large solo show at the Spirol Gallery, Quinebaug Valley Community College, of 35 years of my industrial and product photography. The exhibit aimed to demonstrate that gritty industrial objects can be artful, that regional corporations produce a wide array of high-tech, yet unfamiliar, products, and that the college and regional manufacturers have established the Eastern Advanced Manufacturers Alliance to provide a center for education in new job skills. My mother was a mechanical engineer and a founding member of the Society of Women Engineers. I was proud to use my skill set to illuminate a subject that would have thrilled her.