Jenee Mateer likes to make the tools of representation distort and obscure the natural world. At least, that’s what this Towson University assistant professor of photography and digital media appears to favor as judged by the series of works currently installed at the Jordan Faye Contemporary. In a smaller project space gallery, Mateer installs her The Animals series, an assortment of petite archival inkjet-on-paper animal portraits mounted on wooden blocks with acrylic polymer. Random bits of text float among these images—of a bee, camel, horse, chimpanzee, lion, lizard, cheetah, frog, etc., alongside images of, well, an alien and a unicorn. On an opposite wall, images from The Pleasure of the Text series feature digital photos on fine art paper of book pages, though that isn’t instantly apparent. They’re modest closeups and curiously composed. In one, it looks like Mateer opened a book and laid it on a table, raised some of it pages, and pointed the camera’s lens almost perpendicular to the thin, whispy vertical sheets of paper. The camera’s focus makes the texture of the paper sharp and supple but blurs the text, and the result is more abstract line and light design. It takes a few moments of inspection to figure out what’s going on.

Both of these earlier projects calibrate the eye for Break Boundary: an interest in the natural world and the distortion ability of the camera. In these images, most of which are archival inkjet on paper, Mateer creates a coastal landscape. Bright, cyan skies occupy most of the upper half to two-thirds of the vertical rectangle image; the bottom half to one-third the more cobalt and midnight blue of deep water. They’re polished, they’re slick, and they at first feel somewhat superficially decorative and benignly meditative—until the eye catches a skinny vertical bar separating the image into something like stacked horizontal rectangles.

The Break Boundary series—14 images and two videos in total—is an effort to blend photo collage as landscape with the transcendental weight of abstract expressionism. It’s not entirely successful—the seascape color palette alone is almost too effervescent, suggesting the ethereal delight of a morning in Miami—but that could very well be the meteorological residue of a pair of eyeballs beaten down by a Baltimore February. Even in this only partial success, though, Mateer flirts with some interesting ideas.

The first is a casual reminder of just how readily the natural can evoke the primal consciousness conjured by various abstract expressionist vocabularies. Mateer cites Mark Rothko in her statement, and that influence is immediately grasped in Break Boundary. What’s more intriguing is the subtle power the natural world can have when rearranged into Rothko-ish compositions and dimensions that aspire to that grandeur. The largest work here is “Break Boundary 10,” a 30-by-30 inch square that’s the most effective image in the series. The sky takes up roughly half of the frame, but silken clouds dilute the pale blue to this ghost of a hue. At the horizon line just below the frame’s vertical midline begins the water, a far off wave captured at a gentle roll, nothing cresting yet: merely this dimpled, reflective surface, sunlight hitting and dancing off in a disco-ball dazzle. This section is a thin band, though, as a narrow turquoise band separates it from the more greenish-blue water below. It’s just as textured, only its colder, deeper color temperature lends it the textural motion of a cake hastily iced with frosting, short thick strokes pushing pigments in multiple directions. Put together they look like two different bodies of water trying to coexist as a singular ocean. The image gains its tension from this combination of natural landscape as artificial construct and digital collage as slick construction.

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