Artist Statement:Geography – a fairly recent science – maps the relationships between the earth and its inhabitants. I think of “social geography” as a term to describe my photographic work and methodology. I isolate images of the natural world together with the superimposition of a relentless grid of human interactions and interventions. The meanings of each oscillate and are determined by the other.
The myth of America and particularly its western landscape largely underwrote the ideas of freedom and frontier independence found in much national political rhetoric and as the basis of much popular cultural imagery. Today these same landscapes are deeply charged with social interventions that contradict those mythologies and instead present a harshly pragmatic, yet sometimes sublime, and sometimes negative set of images. These mythic spaces are both aesthetically and politically linked, now inextricably.
For many years now I have been on a personal quest to understand such complex landscapes and our engagement with them.
My work has concerned itself with the massive mining operations, native fossil fuel and burgeoning fractal energy infrastructure. As well, I spent three years following and working along the U.S.-Mexico border, completed a series incorporating the escalating trade industries that thrive at our ports and currently am working on a series addressing water issues in the West.
Essentially, I am recording anonymous modern day monuments that have settled onto the contemporary landscape, telling a conflicted story in geographical, environmental, political and cultural terms. The photographs that I produce question traditional and clichéd notions of landscape, our place within it, and the collective roles and responsibilities in how and why we shape it the way we do.
The philosopher and media theorist, Boris Groys stated: “The goal of art is not to change things — they are changing themselves all the time anyway. Art’s function is, rather, to show, to make visible the realities that are generally overlooked.” It is with this idea in mind that I am contributing to a taxonomy of contemporary landscapes which continues to lead me onto the roads, thruways, highways, freeways and turnpikes between the U.S. coasts and beyond.
About the Artist:
Based in New York, Victoria Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey traversing the American landscape for several months per year. Equipped with a 5×7 inch field camera, film, a video camera and research material, she crosses the country alone tenting on top of her car. Her large-scale project-based photographs document the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological and industrial interventions.
Sambunaris received her MFA from Yale University in 1999. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography Award, the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. In 2011 a twelve-year survey of her work was exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY and travelled throughout the US. Her work is held in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Lannan Foundation, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art. In 2019, Sambunaris was commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation to photograph Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty for the 50th anniversary and Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt. Radius Books published her monographs Taxonomy of a Landscape and the recent Transformation of a Landscape She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in NY.
Exhibition prints Courtesy the Artist, Yancey Richardson Gallery and Private Collector
