Auras

In her ongoing series, Auras, Oakland-based artist Amelia Konow (b.1986) uses photography to explore the borders between science and mysticism. Influenced in part by the aesthetics of Kirlian Photography, a photographic process invented in the late 1930s which reveals visible “auras” around the objects or individuals photographed, Konow utilizes glass lenses and prisms to visualize how the aura of a landscape might appear. For her work, Konow travels to locations often visited by those in search of experiences connected to the mythologies of the landscape—canyons in the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco, waterfalls in eastern Maui, Hawai’i—and returns with images that reflect the often-intangible sensations that specific locations or geological features can evoke. -- Kai Caemmerer, Curator of Photography, SFO Museum