Teressa Danielle Phillips

Teressa Danielle Phillips seeks to extract the beauty and uniqueness of commonplace things and scenes through her photographic images. Education in engineering and fine art allows her to tap into both the logical and intuitive parts of her brain. Science, mathematics, visual art, music, and language all contain a lyrical nature or flow that she strives to find and convey through her work. A well-worked equation, a meaningful poem, and a salient image can all elicit the same sense of emotion for her.

The Romantic Movement in art and literature was a direct response to the industrial revolution and political unrest. It questioned how humans fit into the scope of the world physically and spiritually by slowing down and looking for a sublime response to the beauty, power, and terror of the natural world. Teressa’s Romantic/Gothic landscapes are probing the same ideas in response to the digital revolution and worldwide political unrest. Her Threshold series is an exploration of the landscape within 100 miles of her current home in Columbus, Georgia. The perfect version of the natural landscape exists in our imagination as completely devoid of human interaction. She has taken a rebellious Postmodern approach to this idea by looking for the breaks in the landscape. Lending significance to the differentiation of space, regardless of if the barrier is naturally occurring or a human intervention. Including these spaces, we can explore their impact on our collective feeling and relation to the space and time we occupy. An idyllic water scene is outlined by trees with no visible alteration, yet the whole area is managed and defined by the United States Corps of Engineers. It exists to mimic the once natural flooding but is only achieved by the tightly controlled pumping of water into and out the area for migratory birds because of alterations to the waterway. The vista of a shopping mall acting as a low horizon below melodramatic clouds is just as natural and impactful to our

sense of space as the idyllic scene. Possibly even be more Romantic to the Post-modern eye as it relates more to our transcendent experiences.