Flo Maak

The photographer and sculptor Flo Maak takes nature as her model and ecology as the focus of her study. She builds tableaux of frosted glass plates and large-scale photographs, sometimes exhibiting the installations, other times showing large photographs documenting their creation. The frosted glass serves as a screen evoking smog, clouds, water, and climactic events such as hurricanes. Maak’s assemblages of photographs and hardware, using frosted glass, or fluorescent lamps, chicken wire, and other materials, create constellations of imagery, used to demonstrate the interrelated nature of ecological networks and the human impact on those systems. In image control, future 1, an editioned sculpture made by Maak in 2010, an aluminum frame supports a fluorescent tube lamp and ballast, and displays a spiral of chain link fence material. The piece is emblematic of industrial, post-minimal sculpture, but the fence material recalls the Fibonacci spirals found in nature (especially in the leaf distribution of plants) and the lamp thereby becomes a metaphor for sunlight.

Maak shows regularly in Germany and staged a solo project at dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012.