Deb Achak: All the Colors I Am Inside

In All the Colors I Am Inside, Deb Achak reflects on our relationship with the soft, quiet voice of our intuition and the beauty of who we are under the surface. Achak explores how our inner voice leads us on the most surprising and glorious adventures, but to hear it, we must quiet our brains and savor the present moment. Bringing together human and spiritual worlds, she uses landscapes that are rich and mysterious, the way our dreams and meditations might feel, and portraits in which the subject is consumed by nature, swept up by it. Achak seeks to represent the pictorial quality of intuition using imagery that walks the line between rare and familiar. Ultimately, the work invites us to think less, feel more.

From the text All the Colors I Am Inside by Deb Achak:

The last words my mother said to me before she died were these: ''Trust your gut instincts.'' These four simple words washed over me like stepping into a gently flowing river.

Over the decade that has followed, I've nurtured two insistent preoccupations. One is photography, as I was caught up in a sudden and demanding compulsion to capture real moments in time. The other has been an expansion of my understanding of my own embodied knowledge, a path my mother's words nudged me towards. Since childhood, I had sensed this more mysterious way of observing the world, but I hadn't devoted the necessary time or seriousness to understand this gift.

All the Colors I Am Inside represents the twining together of those two seemingly distinct endeavors. Using tools of light, time, and color, I challenged myself to construct pictures that reference the spark of energy and depth of wonder that pervade our interior lives. A trail of red in the forest where I walk my dog, dandelions moving in the wind above an abandoned bird's nest, fireworks exploding, a giant wave crashing over me, sprinklers misting in the moonlight, a floral bed sheet blurred around my niece. I saw beauty in landscapes and portraiture, but I was searching for what lies beneath the surface.

From the text Elexir by Alison Morley, Chair Emerita, Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism Program, at ICP New York: Pushing beyond the boundaries of the familiar, Deb Achak uses her camera and the study of mindfulness to engage with the allure of life's cycles. In All the Colors I Am Inside, the immediacy of each image seduces us into Achak's constructed visual landscapes. In this enigmatic journey, she offers a place to be quiet yet attentive to the sun and moon, the shades of flora, the shape of a hand, a slight movement, or dappled light falling gently on flesh.

Deb Achak is an American photographer based in Seattle, Wash. Achak's photographs have been featured in many exhibitions including at Winston Wächter Fine Art Seattle and New York, The Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, The National Museum of Anthropology in Tabasco, Mexico, The Lishui Museum of Art in Lishui, China, and The Sofia Photography Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria. She was awarded a Critical Mass Top 200 finalist in 2021, and a recipient of the Julia Margaret Cameron Award in 2023. All the Colors I Am Inside is her debut monograph.

Exhibitions

Winston Wächter Fine Art Seattle, WA, USA, 01.11.-23.12.2023
Winston Wächter Fine Art New York, NY, USA, July-August 2024

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