El Abyssal Tarot es una baraja de arte única con 78 imágenes de sensuales fotografías submarinas. Las imágenes evocadoras están alineadas con la tradición Rider-Waite, aunque difieren en apariencia.

El Tarot Abysal es una baraja de arte única con 78 imágenes de fotografía submarina sensual. Las imágenes evocadoras están alineadas con la tradición Rider- Waite, aunque difieren en apariencia.

Diseñador (s), Artista (s): Shelly Corbett, Stephen Ahlbom

País de publicación: EE. UU.
Número de cartas: 78
Año de publicación: 2005
Estado de publicación: edición limitada de 1000 copias

¡Celebre más de una década de las imágenes de Shelly Corbett en una mística zambullida en el abismo!

Esta baraja captura más de 10 años de fotografía de Shelly Corbett. Varias de las imágenes seleccionadas especialmente para esta baraja nunca se han ofrecido como impresiones.

Esta impresión de 1000 mazos presenta una impresión estocástica sin puntos de 6 colores en el mazo de 78 cartas, un folleto de 32 páginas a juego y una caja de presentación de dos piezas. Cada baraja está numerada y firmada individualmente tanto por el artista como por el autor.

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The Abyssal Tarot is a unique art deck with 78 images of sensual underwater photography. The evocative images are aligned with the Rider-Waite tradition, though they differ in appearance.

El Tarot Abysal es una baraja de arte única con 78 imágenes de fotografía submarina sensual. Las imágenes evocadoras están alineados con la tradición Rider- Waite , aunque difieren en apariencia.

Designer(s), Artist(s): Shelly Corbett, Stephen Ahlbom

Country of Publication: U.S.A.
Number of Cards: 78
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Status: Limited edition of 1,000 copies

Celebrate over a decade of Shelly Corbett’s images in a mystic plunge into the abyss!

This deck captures over 10 years of Shelly Corbett’s photography. Several of the images selected specially for this deck have never been offered as prints.

This 1000 deck printing features 6-color dotless stochastic impression on the 78-card deck, a matching 32 page booklet and two-piece presentation box. Each deck is individulally numbered and signed by both the artist and the author.

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Review by Solandia

"The abyss of the water’s gentle depths is symbolic of the psychic depths of sensation, emotion, intuition, contemplation, and the unconscious."

The Abyssal Tarot is a unique collection of sensual underwater art photography by Shelly Corbett. The photographs were chosen from twelve years of her work, loosely aligned with the Rider-Waite tradition, and showcased as a deck of seventy-eight Tarot cards.

Shelly’s photography is romantic and otherworldly: the figures float weightlessly, like mermaids, seeming to flow though the card. The use of various shutter speeds to capture the image results in a blurring, that gives a sense of movement and unreality as though the figures were interrupted only briefly in their drift through the scene.

The colors are luminous; incredibly strong reds and blues leap out from the cards, and the images are sensual. Most cards show woman in various stages of undress; the nudity varies from romantic (Wheel of Fortune) to suggestive and arty (The Sun) to female full-frontal (the Moon, the Ace of Cups) to raunchy (Knight of Swords) to the appearance of violence (Devil and Judgement). The nudity isn’t gratuitous; it allows the body language to express as much emotion as the face, which is not always seen.

There is a range of emotion in the Abyssal cards, running the gamut from rage, love, fear, lust, innocence, pain, sadness, curiosity to passivity. The Lovers features an entwined couple, poised as though to kiss, their hair floating around their faces. The Devil is confronting, in its violent images of a woman, a hand around her throat, her eyes closed and her mouth open in what appears to be a soundless scream. My own favourites from the deck are the Wheel of Fortune (a woman, her face half under the water, holds a white bird in her hands; red roses border the cards and the background is green and deep, rich blue), and The Sun, which is a golden, soft-focused card with a central woman and glowing yellow filaments around them.

Published in a limited edition of 1000 copies, the decks are each numbered and individually signed by both creators. There were numerous obstacles in the path of the publication of these cards – the eroticism and suggestion of violence led to five published declining to print the work, but the eventual publisher produced a high quality deck, book and box. The two-piece box is made from very glossy card and shows an image of the Tower card on the front. The cards themselves are large-sized and on quite thin and flexible cardstock. All are in vibrant colour (except for the black-and-white image of the Four of Wands) and printed in a fine process so that the final images appear less ‘dotted’.

The major arcana titles are standard Rider-Waite - as are the suits of Cups, Pentacles, Wands and Swords, and court cards of Page, Knight, Queen, and King. There are gold borders on the left side and base of the cards; the titles are in black font at the bottom right and subtitles printed in unobtrusive small, white text running down the card from the top left. The minor arcana also have very subtle suit symbols in the top right of the card. The backs are not reversible, featuring a split design with representations of the four elements.

The companion booklet, written by Stephen Ahlbom, is glossy and full-colour on all of its 32 pages. It begins with an introduction to the origin of the deck, an original nine-card spread called The Path Through The Abyss, and a short list of keywords for the directions, suits, courts, numbers and aces. The rest of the book contains small colour images of all the cards alongside a description, card subtitle and keywords. For example:

1 – Magician. A wizard nods to the audience after producing a handful of flowers from the sleeve of his bright red robe. His sincere belief in the power of his own illusions is absolutely unshakable. {Immediate Family} Will, Mastery, Determination, Confidence, Enlightenment, Leadership, Ingenuity, Skill.

The imagery of the Abyssal Tarot is wholly unusual: complex, rich and evocative. The use of traditional meanings means that it can be used by intermediate and experienced readers for meditation or divination, but its unique art photography sets it apart as a special deck for the collector.

“Cannon Gallery’s Corbett show exhibits work of surprise, mystery”

Seattle Times Tempo - December 9, 1994

Large-scale photographs deserve extra credit, especially if they are as (sensual and metaphoric) as the new work by Shelly Corbett in the Linda Cannon Gallery.

Her images, type C and chromogenic prints enlarged up to 30 by 40 inches, are richly colored and full of mystery.

It isn’t obvious that the photographs of her nude models were taken underwater. They are subtle, with only shimmery rays of refracted light and a feeling of suspended gravity to give them away.

“I usually place myself at the bottom of the pool,” Corbett writes. “The models feel a sense of privacy and protection from the water, seeing only their reflection. I become a voyeur to their intimate behavior.”

Corbett rents a local pool, dons a weight belt and goggles, and works with her models in water about 5 feet deep. She hangs curtains of colored cloth for a backdrop, although she often shoots directly up toward the sky to capture surface reflections.

Corbett recently started bringing lights into the pool with her, and uses filters on them to alter the cool blue of a swimming pool to warmer browns and golds.

In many of the images, the colorful fabrics of red, purple, royal blue and burgundy float upward, and with the models’ fanned-out hair combines to create a look of Renaissance angels floating in Italian ceiling frescoes. There is a strong historical presence of European painting in her photographs, namely the pale, delicate skin and the sensual red tones found in paintings by Peter Paul Reubens, a Flemish artist of the 17th century.

While other photographers, most notably Cindy Sherman, have created photographic images that hearken back to earlier periods in European art, Corbett manages to compose photographs that don’t feel forced or set up. The sense of poking fun at portrait painting evident in Sherman’s work is absent in Corbett’s photographs. Instead of parodying art from the 17th-century Europe she has expanded on the theme. Her work might easily have fit into an abstract movement in baroque art had such works existed.

Instead of being pure dissertations on the nude and of light and color, these photographs have some nasty, occasionally graphic themes that spice them up, One titled “The Bride” features a woman with her facial features blurred facing toward the camera with red flowers in her lap and a pair of hands placed menacingly around her neck. Corbett’s use of color in this piece is exquisite, which lends to the eerie and disturbing quality of this photograph. The aquamarine overtones in the photograph give her skin a surreal, bluish white tint, and the royal blue, red and sienna colors accentuate it.

This piece is reminiscent of a painting by Gustave Courbet titled “The Preparations of the Bride,” (Underneath this painting Courbet’s original version depicts women preparing the body of a dead woman for burial. Art historians discovered this version after noticing that the face of the “bride” looked quite emotionless and her skin tones lifeless.

Corbett’s occasionally graphic moments take her photographs to one extreme; a series of images with her models wielding bouquets of flowers and pastels fabrics take it to another, less interesting place. With glib titles such as “Constant Promises” and“Ardent Seduction,” Her use of flowers often seem trite and it strips away the intrigue of the image. The sense that something important is about to happen and the moments of private humor vanish is these pieces. Luckily, this is but a small theme in the show, and forgivable after all of the artist’s sensual and metaphoric creations.

Some of her prints with flowers do work, however. And besides her traditional color prints, Corbett has produced a series of manipulated Iris prints. Scanning color prints into a computer, enhancing them, and printing the new image directly onto watercolor paper via printer called the “Iris.” Corbett manipulates the colors in the scanned prints dramatically, and sometimes removes distracting elements, but she basically keeps the image intact.

The printing process subdues the colors in the photograph and gives the print the textured paper surface of a watercolor. The muted colors make the images much quieter, and although they are beautiful, they get lost in all the brilliance and commotion of the large, more traditional prints in the show.

— Lisa Karl

Statement from the Artist

I grew up in America: Catholic, white and middle class. Repressed. My parents did not express affection with one another. So from the very beginning of this work, I had to face my fears about naked bodies. I had to consider my own body, naked. I had to look at my own sexuality.

I approached it as research. I looked at Playboy and Penthouse and they disturbed me because I felt the way they looked at naked bodies was in a narrow way. A way that didn’t include a woman’s perspective. It created in me the desire to show women from a woman’s point of view.

There is a voyeurism to this, but it is not like peeping at an unknown person. It is more like looking into people’s windows at night to look into their lives. I want to capture what is true. I am interested in relationships, especially couples. Because two people in relationship with each other will add dimensions to the work that are impossible to predict or manipulate. It’s like the water gives them permission to be playful, sensual, spiritual, even threatening.
small breezes

My first exhibition looked like the Sistine Chapel, although my figures were fully clothed. The photo grains were enlarged and the play of light and darkness created chiaroscuro even when I was photographing underwater. When I stripped the figures of their clothes I found my subject.

Over the course of years, my work has changed and matured as I have. The compositions have become more complex, the focus has sharpened and colors have become explosive. When I became pregnant all my sexual issues again rose to the surface. It was amazing. It was bizarre. It was sexual. It was made clear what my body was for, not just to incubate another human being, but to feed, nurture, sustain life. It reinforced the beauty and the reality of women in unexpected shapes and sizes.

I find models and choose them for their willingness to let go and improvise, for their long hair and for a curvaceous body type because these elements assert themselves most strongly to the camera. Asking people to take their clothes off and interact underwater so that I can take pictures of them does not naturally come to me or my models. I use a slow shutter and I never know what I’m going to get. The images keep shifting. The models interact. When I see something that rings true, I guide them in that direction.

Vivid LipstickWhat remains fascinating is the liquidity of it. A relationship can flow through so many manifestations. It is possible for lovers to be parent and child, best friends, even adversaries. Roles shift from moment to moment.

Once I put a chair into the pool with the models and the focus turned to power and bondage. I think there’s a natural jump when you add the harness of props and possessions to thsoftness of naked interaction. That's what I look for. I put people together and wait for something to happen. When it does, I follow it and push it along and photograph it.

Another time, two women came to me at a show. They were best friends and agreed to model for me. When they got into the water and started interacting their smallest gestures began to play out archetype relationships. At one moment they were lovers, in another, mother and child. In the next, they they were friends and it was very chaste. These roles were revealed in simple physicality. How one person reaches out to one another or how a woman touches her own breasts shows all.

I believe the work allows us to look at ourselves in all our roles: the ones that please us and the ones that discomfort us.

— Shelly Corbett