HOME: JEFFREY BLONDES

19 Sep - 2 Nov 2025

JEFFREY BLONDES
HOME
Jeffrey Blondes creates long-form videos, film-still editions, and drawings that illuminate the often-overlooked rhythms of the natural world. Since 1990, his practice has centered on the subtle cycles of landscapes and their relation to the passage of time. Attuned to the delicate interplay of weather, light, and planetary motion, Blondes transforms these shifts into works that invite viewers to slow down and recognize the profound significance of even the smallest changes unfolding around us each day. In Home, Blondes’ third exhibition with Maya Frodeman Gallery, he turns his focus on the landscapes closest to him – the tree outside his window, the fields he has walked for decades, and the cycles of light and season around his home in Touraine, France.
21-04D Chêne Canopy Summer, 2021

Charcoal on paper

47 1/4 x 26 3/4 inches
Framed dimensions 59 x 38 inches

For Blondes, home is not only a place, but the act of looking closely. “This is my Eden,” he reflects on the house he has lived in for 30 years. Known for his durational films, Blondes captures time as it unfolds – minute by minute, season by season. His works often stretch across months or years, looping endlessly, so that living with them becomes an experience of noticing change: a drop of water on a branch, the shifting canopy of leaves, the gradual turn of the earth. Time in his films does not rush forward but expands, encouraging viewers to move from simply looking to deeply seeing.
The 12-hour film Un Chêne Canopy is a conceptual time-based artwork conceived as a visual clock. The camera completes a full revolution over the course of 12 hours, marking the passage of time while simultaneously revealing the shifting seasons across a full year. Through seamless 3-hour dissolves, seasonal transitions unfold fluidly, immersing the viewer in a continuous, uninterrupted cycle of change. The 104-hour film la Petite Cartinière Nord records the view north from a window in Blondes’ home, capturing the sunrise and sunset every week over the course of a year. Similarly, the film charts time’s rhythm as the year’s seasons gradually unfold.
LaPteC : 104 hours x 60 minutes, ed. 1/7, 2025

Digital Pigment Print on 315g Rag (Bergger Fine Art Paper)

90 x 60 inches

Home also reflects Blondes’ ongoing fascination with the earth as a living body – a lung that breathes, a pulse that endures beyond human pace. His films are less about landscape as scenery than about earthly rhythms: sunrise and sunset, the slow growth of grass, the dissolving overlap of seasons. Prints made from his films extend this exploration into two dimensions, condensing hours of footage into fields of evolving color that echo the experience of his moving images.
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He returned to drawing during the pandemic, where, for the first time, he worked not on site as was his usual orientation, but in the studio in his home, creating charcoal and pencil “stills” inspired by moments drawn from his films. He continues this practice, using films like le Bois de Mametz and Un Chêne Canopy, extracting projected images and working with pencil and charcoal in a painstakingly methodical and meditative manner. Through Home, Blondes invites us to inhabit time differently: to experience slowness, to witness transformation, and to find revelation in the ordinary view just beyond the window.
Born in Washington, D.C., in 1956, Blondes first moved to Paris in 1981 for four years, then returned in 1988. Since 1992 his home has been in the Loire Valley. The artist’s work is collected both publicly and privately. Past exhibitions include the Centre d’Arts et de Nature, Chaumont-sur-Loire; Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France; Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, CT; bitforms Gallery, New York, NY; David Findlay Jr. Contemporary, New York, NY; Metivier Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA; The Fine Art Society, London, and GBS Fine Art in the UK; Three Shadows Photography Art Center, Xiamen, China; among others. He has completed numerous commissioned works for public and private collections, including Wilson, WY; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey; and Stanford Arts, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Blondes’ artworks are exhibited in hospitals around the world including Memorial Sloan Kettering, New York, NY; Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, MD; and St. Thomas Hospital, London, UK.