Colette Chermak is a multimedia artist who reinterprets the everyday experience. She documents the sublime, overwhelming beauty of individual moments, reflecting on the immediacy, ephemerality, and fragility of nature; she reveres the mundane, reimagining ordinary perceptions of the world to create illusory scenes. Her work acknowledges the subsequent sense of these moments having just passed, a resignation to the fading. 

Chermak’s work embodies the pursuit of the ‘fleeting moment.’ It is inherently conflicted. Conceptually, it strives to capture what cannot be claimed, a futile attempt at preserving evanescent experiences. Visually, the work straddles representation and abstraction, generating a multimedia process centered around a ‘practice of looking.’ Using photography, painting, and found materials, Chermak employs a variety of filters — some inherent to technology, others of her own design — within her work, contradicting classic depictions of scenery and still life, ultimately challenging traditional methods of visual documentation through a contemporary lens.

Colette Chermak is currently based in Upstate New York. She received her BFA from Alfred University in 2023.