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The fine art photographer, Dorie Klein, b. 1954 in Pittsburgh, PA has lived in Camden, Maine with her husband, Dana Strout and three cats since 1994.
Dorie is creating a new series of photographs or Still-life Arrangements for a one-person exhibition at the Ellsworth Public Library in Maine called “Things I Love” (October 2007). The common thread that is woven into each of her various bodies of work is the desire to give new life and meaning to things and ideas that have gone by. Deeply touched by tremendous personal losses, her optimistic personality attempts to transform the darkness into light.
Dorie’s formal art education began at the age of ten when she won seven consecutive scholarships to attend private Saturday morning art classes at Carnegie Tech, and later at Carnegie Mellon University prior to graduating high school. This experience provided a traditional foundation in Basic Design, Drawing and Painting. While her career took a detour following high school, she ultimately realized her dream and studied at Rhode Island School of Design, earning a Bachelor of Fine Art Degree in Photography in 1988. She later earned a Master of Fine Art Degree at Vermont College in "Visual Culture" in 1999.
Two of Dorie’s best-known photographic projects focus on Super-fund environmental clean-up sites. The first project (1991-1994) includes photographs arranged on an altar dedicated to Albuquerque’s South Valley Hispanic neighborhood affected by the pollution. The Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe purchased this altar as a memorial. Her work on this project also won a grant from the Center for Transformative Art, judged by the art writer/critic Suzi Gablik. Several of these images were included in the exhibition “Creating Ourselves,” in Portales, NM where Dorie won another award judged by the art writer/critic, Lucy Lippard.
Having won grants for this environmental work, Dorie completed another project highlighting the environmental challenges faced by the neighborhoods abutting the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Denver, Colorado (1991-1994). As in the Albuquerque site, the Arsenal was a chemical storage facility and dump for chemical warfare materials that had subsequently and seriously polluted the local groundwater. The culmination of this project involved the fabrication of a huge chain link fence from which the photographs hung, simulating the experience of accessing the Arsenal from behind such a barrier. The Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute supported The Arsenal Project and displayed it at the Boulder Public Library.
Currently, Dorie’s work uses non-traditional photographic processes. She often bypasses the use of a camera and instead uses a computer scanner as her camera lens and aperture. The subjects are often natural materials that she arranges and prints in rich, saturated colors and precise details against a dark background. The loss to cancer of two primary figures in her life--her mother and sister (the late New York City sculptor, Janice Dale Klein) has inspired a closer look at the elemental qualities of life and the similarities in structures. Dorie’s work is also an attempt to give a renewed life to subjects that have passed on. This is her way, using art, to keep alive the spirit of her lost loved ones.
Orion online magazine and more than seventy exhibitions across the United States have included Dorie’s work. Several private institutions and individuals have purchased her work for their collections. She has also been an active member of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA) since 1994, and currently serves as Vice Chair. Dorie is building a complete portfolio and continuing to participate in regional and national shows. She is interested in being represented by a major gallery and is working on the layout for a book to be self-published about her twenty-year career as an artist.
Dorie Klein is a compassionate friend of the earth. Her photographs delight the senses and communicate on many levels. The depth of her feelings is palpable.
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