Time Enters The Landscape, 2024
Original and found photographs, archival pigment prints, archival glue, fire and ash
44x61”
LANDSCAPES OF ILLUSIONS AND POSSIBILITIES: MAPS, MATERIALS AND THE LENS
Participating Artists:
Alicia Piller | Beth Davila Waldman | Naomi White
Landscapes of Illusions and Possibilities is a response to this tumultuous moment in time through a photographic lens. Themes of empowerment, intersectional abolitionist feminism, hope and healing run through these works. Notions of navigation, mapping, border crossing, fluidity and flux occur, with the conceit that everything changes.
Transformation is how we survive.
Thinking through and with historical theories on landscape and power, including Octavia Butler’s Parable series, this project contends with the importance and inevitability of change. Tearing into photographs holds open places in the land for stolen, lost, misremembered stories, and stories that are yet to be written. Transformation is the key to transcending our current situation, from climate change to genocide. According to WJT Mitchell, the landscape is not just something to be looked at but a process, like art, activated by choices and labor.
How do collages resist the historical tendency to make memories static and normalized? Disrupting old surveyor photographs of the West as symbols for past and current oppressive systems of settler colonialism, we encounter hope and resiliency.
Thirty million years ago, early humans evolved the ability to see color, initially distinguishing only between red and green to identify edible berries and food. Over time, as our vision adapted and expanded to detect a wider spectrum of colors, we developed the ability to perceive all colors effortlessly. Similarly, our capacity to envision worlds beyond corporate greed and human suffering is evolving. Just as our perception of color has grown more refined, we can also hone our ability to imagine and work towards a more just and equitable future taking shape.
- Naomi White, Los Angeles, July 2024
"When I Escaped From The Neighborhood It Was Burning," 18x24”
"All That You Touch You Change, All That You Change, Changes You," 18x24"
"Radical Hope, Tumultuous Waters," 18x24”
"We are Earthlife Preparing to Fall Away From The Parent World," 26x33”
The Map Of Our Illusions, 44x68”
Close Up of Time Enters The Landscape
"I Had My Recurring Dream Last Night," 18x24”
Alicia Piller, Pathways, Mapping Injustices, 2021
Naomi White, I Had My Recurring Dream Last Night, 2024
Alicia Piller, Overhead Views. Visionary Pathways, 64”H x 44”W x 33”D
Beth Davila Waldman, Divisions No. 13, 2023
87x38.5" Archival Pigment and Acrylic Paint on Tarp and Canvas with Grommets
Beth Davila Waldman
Divisions No. 12 and 15, 2023, 87.5x38.5in, Archival Pigment and Acrylic Paint on Tarp and Canvas with Grommets
Photographs from this exhibition are by my former student, NYFA MFA Alumni, Pamela Garcia @pamelagarciaphotoevents
