Artist Statement
As an image maker and story teller I am intensely aware of place. As I chronicle the State and National Parks, I retrace the path taken by my grandmother, mother, and aunts to the West Coast in the 1930’s and 1940’s. I studied with Beaumont Newhall at The University of New Mexico in the 1980’s falling in love with photographs made by Government survey photographers like Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan. I document these vistas, from the historic images bequeathed by Newhall and from my families faded snapshots, pasted into albums whose spines are broken and flaked with age.
Mine is not a simple journey. I absorb these geographies with an intimacy of the savage experiences passed on by my depression era ancestors. These emotions are entwined by my complicated passage on modern, absent thruways, past subdivisions and fast-food chains that smother the historic and homogenize the past. I have turned my attention to the wildness that remains in the Nation’s Parks and strive for what Newhall believed, that the power of the photograph entwined with the model of the open landscape are a public trust that can democratize the citizens of the world.
Artist Bio
Works in photography and video has been awarded five National Endowment for the Arts Awards in four categories: Photography (National Endowment for the Arts Individual Award, Washington D.C., (1990), and an Individual Fellowship Award, NEA/Arts Midwest, Minneapolis,Minnesota, (1987). Film and Video Production, Individual Fellowship Regional NEA/Jerome Foundation, Minneapolis,MN. (1993). Interdisciplinary Arts Award, NEA/Rockefeller Foundation, Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota, (1988) And New Genres, (National Endowment for the Arts Individual Award), Washington D.C. (1995).
Additional awards include a Seattle Arts Commission "Public Works" Award, (2010)Black Maria Film Festival, Los Angeles, CA. Grand Festival Prize , "IMAGES: Festival of Independent Film and Video," Montreal, Canada, Film Board of Canada, Juror’s Choice " Kiss The Boys" Three Rivers Arts Festival”, Pittsburgh, PA. First Place Best Experimental Work, University of Oregon Queer Film Festival, Eugene, Oregon, and a Best Audience Award from, Shorts:Iowa City International Documentary Festival. In addition I received an Iowa Humanities Major Project Award, Iowa Arts Council, (2008), three Arts and Humanities Initiative Awards, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA., (2007-2005-2003), Editing Residency Award, The Wexner Center, The Ohio State University, The Faculty Scholar Award for U of Iowa, (2005)
Nominated for Fulbright Scholar Award for Italy by the Center for the International Exchange of Scholars, Washington D.C. (2008-2009)
Exhibited nationally and internationally, my work has been shown at: Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York, NY; The Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; The Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C; The Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; The American Museum of Art in Minneapolis, MN; "Mediopolis,"The 1995 Berlin Film and Video Festival, Berlin; Camerawork,San Francisco, CA; The Henry Gallery, Seattle, WA; Art Basel: An International Exhibition, Miami Beach, FL; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson Arizona; Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock NY; Bocorv Gallery, Tel Aviv,Israel; University of Leeds, Leeds, England; Hong Kong Arts Center, Wanchai, Hong Kong; "Malajustment" Lincoln Theatre, Boston, MA; Henry Gallery, University of Washington; TIAA/CREF Collection, KansasCity, MO; Ellis Island Museum, Ellis Island, New York, NY.
Publications include: The Living and The Dead: The Neapolitan Cult of the Skull, 2010, University of Chicago Press, Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photography, 2002, Harper’s Magazine, 2001, Contact Sheet #110, Detained In Purgatory, Light Work, 2000, Lesbian Art In America, Rizzoli Press, 2000, Art, Document, Market, Science:Photography’s Multiple Roles, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 1998, and Reframing’s: New Feminist Photographies, Temple University Press, 1996. Video Works are represented by the Video Data Bank in Chicago.