Amber Toplisek is an interdisciplinary artist based in Atlanta, GA. Her work explores the network of images that reside within, functioning as an imperceptible alchemy that influence and guide our lives. By embedding once-immaterial images into tangible structures, she aims to amplify the potential for images to coalesce within the viewer's physical body. Amber’s work engages with different methods of obfuscation and utilizes both kinetic and still interventions in order to investigate and extend an encounter with a photographic image.

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"To look at Amber Toplisek’s works is to be conscious of one’s senses in the act of perceiving. What does it mean to see one seeing or to hear one hearing? This becomes the crux of her work, the unfolding of the act of sensing and its relation to human experience and understanding. As such, the objects she makes place the viewer in various stages between still and moving, seen and unseen, material and immaterial, and rising and descending.

Toplisek pulls images from videos, found or family archives, and other sources before working them into sculptural structures. What these images depict—water waves, portraits, abstractions—is not often tied to the meaning of the work. Instead, the photographs become aspects of the overall material and speak to greater notions of representation, likeness, mnemonics, optics, and so on. Often these images, whether moving or still, are encased or encapsulated by other materials such as steel, plexi, water, solder, and glass, among other things.

The forms take their shape as the artist goes, ultimately guided by chance and response. Webs or boxes form around them, or an image is placed into a large sheet of metal, or even into a tank of water, which drains and fills in a constant loop bringing forth an image just before its revelation, before sinking back down into obscurity. It is the physical manifestation of breathing deeply.

One may see that the material Toplisek uses is “naked”—that is, it is not painted, masked, or hidden—even while the image seems to withhold something. As the images themselves are often physically held, we may see them as constrained or trapped. But they are not imprisoned. Instead, they are a part of the whole, an action that nudges the viewer towards an experience of “flow” that is slow and attentive. It rejects the hastiness of things and asks us to consider our breath and the nature of daily mindless yet positive tasks like washing clothes or sweeping the floor. 

Repetition—in making but also through photography, as a repeatable process—becomes a central theme to her oeuvre. Toplisek does not seek to point us to a representation of the “out there,” although we cannot help at times but see that even in its obfuscated form. One might think of notions of memory, both personal and collective, as well as the unique and the ubiquitous. But ultimately, the purpose of this work is to point us to the coming and going of objects and sights—her work is a material expression of a phenomenology of the inconspicuous."

Artist Profile written by Colin Edgington

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