Meghann Riepenhoff's work deals with the Sublime.

The Sublime is an often disputed conceptual term in art and aesthetics which deals with an overwhelming feeling of greatness or awe, often of such intensity that it leaves a viewer temporarily numb or nonreactive to the stimulus. In other words, it's when you’re shook. This is the feeling Meghann Riepenhoff wants her viewers to feel when experiencing her large, camera-less photographs.

Viewers of Riepenhoff’s work will feel like they are experiencing the shores of the beach through more than just a traditional photograph. An Atlanta native, Riepenhoff received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute where she continues to explore ideas of time, impermanence, and the sublime through her process-oriented prints. The cyanotype process is an alternative photographic process with a painterly quality that usually relies on digital negatives and U.V. light to create clear photographic images. Riepenhoff’s work is very process-based, where she coats her paper to achieve a strong blue hue where the light hits and then lays the coated paper along the shore for the ocean waves to roll over it. In this way, the places where the water hits will appear white or lighter while the areas untouched will be a deep blue. Instead of literally taking photographs of the ocean, she creates a collaboration between herself, the water, the sun, and the land, producing an ephemeral and changing portrait of the land. These images are completely unpredictable, aside from the blue of the cyanotype medium. They capture a portrait of the place and a moment in time, the ultimate goal of photography, but look much more abstract and trippy.

Riepenhoff continues to explore these non-traditional photographic processes with the land. She has released a few monographs of her series that use alternative processes to explore portraits of places, including one for the specific cyanotype series Littoral Drift. She engages in artist residencies around the world where she works to create her nature portraits. The work she creates is never permanently fixed, so it continues to react to the light and environment over time. She'll transport you to the beach, full of rocking waves, now!