Artist's Statement
Kauffman's Desert's Edge photographs are of the Great Basin, Sonoran, and Mojave deserts. These works explore a relationship of random organic shapes in nature to a geometric sense of human perfection. Usually humans impose geometry on the landscape with their cities, dams, farmlands and roads. Kauffman's eye finds naturally occurring mathematical relationships between clouds and mountains, earth and sky that create archetypal shapes. These immense shadow structures loom larger than the great Pyramids of Egypt and are just as mysterious. Kauffman captures an ephemeral moment created by sun, clouds and mountains. The digital images, while cropped and enhanced, remain true to nature's hand at work in the environment.

Kauffman represents an effort common among a growing number of artists to restore function to art. Our contemporary technocratic society has fostered an alienation from nature, yet our growing ecological awareness has made us realize that such alienation can only threaten our hope of physical and emotional survival. If art can experiment with, and increase our consciousness in this and other areas vital to contemporary life, art may once again regain the kind of pivotal role that it possessed in ancient cultures.
Ruth Iskin, Art Historian

Click on images to see enlargements.

Biography
Dr. Kauffman received her MFA in Studio Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine, having previously studied at Universities in England (University of London,) Yugoslavia (University of Belgrade,) Spain, (Instituto de Bellas Artes) including one year of graduate study at the Instituto Allende (Universidad de Guanajuato) in Mexico. Her paintings, drawings, photographs and murals are in many private and corporate collections and have been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Berkeley, San Francisco, Australia, and Europe with a recent one-person exhibit at the CZECH MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS in Prague, the Czech Republic.
Dr. Kauffman earned a Ph.D. with a dissertation on The Belief System of the Art Avant-Garde. She is an Associate Professor, having taught Studio Art and Art History for 24 years. She is currently teaching at Chaminade University in Honolulu, both on-line Art History classes and physically-present Studio and Art History classes.
Dr. Kauffman recently won the Elizabeth Morse Genius Foundation Award and the Dr. Wu and Elsie Ject-Key Memorial Award for her art. She is featured in the national reference books Who's Who in America, Who's Who of American Women, Video Directory of Best American Painters, The California Art Review, The International Who's Who of Intellectuals, The World Who's Who of Women, 200 Outstanding Intellectuals of the 21st Century and The Dictionary of International Biography.