NEW YORK, NY.- CLAMP opened Doris Mitsch’s solo show, “Locked Down Looking Up”—the artist’s fourth inclusion in an exhibition at the gallery.

“Locked Down Looking Up” started as a series of images made over time from a fixed point—outside the artist’s front door—during the San Francisco Bay Area’s lockdown to slow the spread of Covid-19. Multiple shots were combined to show the flight trails of birds, insects, and bats. While most everything in Doris Mitsch’s life had come to a standstill, up in the air, there was still a lot going on. Later, when she started to be able to move around a little more, she began to explore other locations.

The photos of flight trails (birds, bees, etc.) are not time-lapse images, but composite digital photographs combining hundreds and sometimes thousands of shots taken over the course of a few seconds or a couple of minutes, showing the same animals in different positions in space over time.

The artist discusses the work at length in her TED talk from April 2023, which is accessible online, where they describe the project as follows:

Artist Doris Mitsch invites us to revel in the wonders of nature through her dazzling photography: stacked images of starlings in flight, hawks surfing thermal updrafts, bats echolocating through the night sky and more. Revealing the hidden trails created by creatures in flight, her work offers unique insight into the intelligence behind nature's invisible rhythms.

The artist comments: “We humans have invented whole digital worlds, but sometimes we still need to be reminded that there’s more in this heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy; and that there are endless ways to look at familiar sights, like a bird in flight, with fresh eyes—to expand our shared experience in a way that connects us with the rest of the living world; to feel both kinship with our fellow creatures and respect and even reverence for their otherness.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a soft-cover book (8 x 10 inches, 36 pages, $40).

Doris Mitsch’s artwork has been exhibited extensively across the United States, and reviewed in numerous publications, including Tricycle, Afterimage, The Sun, Works & Conversations, Creative Quarterly, and Adventure Journal. She received a B.A. from Stanford University and also studied at the California College of the Arts (formerly CCAC).