"Acido Dorado: Illusions' is from an abstracted series, where I blended landscape, figure and architectural lines into one plane of reflective surface. I photographed inside a glass house in the middle of the desert, where the light and reflections would mirror all over its surface.
-Mona Kuhn
Acido Dorado: Illusions was photographed at architect Robert Stone's secluded glass house located in California's Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree. Inspired by the early autumn light and elongated shadows in the desert at the beginning and the end of the day, the resulting prints are imbued with a fluid, dreamy palette of yellow, gold and blue. Kuhn's collaboration with The Lapis Press introduced her to a process that ultimately gave the images a radiance that complements the shimmering, reflective quality of the images.
These three images take the viewer on a journey from the classic nude into a study of pure abstraction, and finally to the figure as the backdrop for an exploration of light and shadow. Building from her European background and mastery of nude studies, Kuhn's artful manipulations of light and reflection present the human form as no longer the central element to the work, seeming to expand it into a tangential vision. In Acido Dorado: Illusions, the figure is transformed into another surface upon which light moves - a surface which seems to capture the essence of the moment and reflects it back to us.