The Secret Garden

The imagery of Janelle Pietrzak, invites you into a hidden world that evokes myth and mystery. Her photographs tempt you to shed the rubric of the outside world and for a moment believe in magic. Inspired by unique locations around the globe, Janelle Pietrzak uses self-portraiture to explore transcendence. Conjuring ghosts, goddesses, and deities, her solitary figures embody the phenomenal spirits that haunt clandestine spaces. Janelle Pietrzak summons the viewer into her long exposure photographs, and transports them to mystical places that seem more dream than reality. Similar to Victorian era images of spirits and fairies, one cannot immediately determine the truth of what is being shown. Solo figures haunt extraordinary starlit landscapes, decaying Spanish haciendas, and rugged coasts. These feminine figures are at times elusive, but always formidable. As these are indeed photographs, only the medium belies the fact that what is being seen must exist in realty. Janelle Pietrzak invites the heart to see, and requests that the mind is quieted, so that magical can be illuminated. A traditionalist, Janelle Pietrzak relies little on Adobe Photoshop to produce her images, rather exploring the interplay between light and time. Her photographs are performance rather than simulation; like frozen films, what the viewer sees, is what the camera has recorded. Saturated in color, indescribable blues contrast with vibrant yellows, brilliant greens, and sanguine reds. Everything, from the settings to the costumes, draws the viewer in and asks them, if only for a moment, to suspend disbelief and enter The Secret Garden.