Susan Burnstine: Afterglow

Obscura Gallery presents “Afterglow,” a solo photographic exhibition by Susan Burnstine who uses homemade cameras and lenses to photograph vistas throughout America. She then prints the images on vellum over gold, producing ethereal landscape images of deeply meaningful atmosphere.

The artist reception takes place on Saturday, December 12, 3-5pm.

This series draws from Rinpa, a Japanese art tradition known for luminous surfaces and a tension between opulence and emptiness. Using homemade cameras and lenses, I photograph vistas of American places and print them on vellum over gold, transforming landscape into something ethereal, unstable, imperfect, and reflective rather than fixed. The gold becomes an atmosphere of memory and reverence, while the vellum holds light like a threshold between presence and disappearance. Guided by the philosophy of mono no aware, this work does not attempt to idealize place but instead reveals how beauty can persist alongside fracture, uncertainty, and contradiction. These images hold opposing qualities at once: they are intimate and expansive, precise and dissolved, seen and half-remembered. – Susan Burnstine