In the City of Angels Print

By Mat Gleason The new media work of Jeff Randall Rosenfield delivers meditative visual articulations of epic themes. The strength of fine art is its ability to go beyond words and emote meaning as truth clearer than diction ever can. In that regard, Rosenfield is an artist we might call Herculean. The thread running throughout most of his artworks is the tentative nature of both repose and motion. Take for instance his photographic manipulation entitled “I and I”. The concept of the separate, higher self expressed in this familiar, poetic term is a philosophical idea so vast that to understand it could require a cerebral journey. Rosenfield blends the action of a dancer’s repose with her physical undulation to the music. Which is the higher self: The dancer in the middle of what she does or at the moment she knows to begin what she has mastered? That is the riddle of “I and I” as a concept and manifested in the majesty of Jeff’s finished artwork. Throughout all these pictures, there are double exposures of subjects more subtly moving, all surrounded by an eclectic chiaroscuro between brilliant colors and fateful darkness. Some images bounce about the picture plane; others are more sedate. Even the slightest flap of the sparrow’s wing produces energy that ignites a picture under the direction of Rosenfield - and what he does must really be called direction. The accepted term “photo manipulation” implies a coercion of imagery outside its natural state. Rosenfield does not do this. He directs his subjects in all their multiplicity to simply reveal their truths. That is the Herculean strength of Jeff Randall Rosenfield, to tell truths so wide they need images to go beyond language.