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Museum of Contemporary Photography presents Victoria Sambunaris. Taxonomy of a Landscape

Museum of Contemporary Photography presents Victoria Sambunaris. Taxonomy of a Landscape an exhibition on view Jan 11 — Mar 31, 2013.

Victoria Sambunaris
Victoria Sambunaris Untitled (Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park, Texas), 2010

For more than a decade, Victoria Sambunaris (American, born 1964) has traversed the United States equipped with a five-by-seven wooden field camera and sheets of color negative film. Covering seemingly every road and freeway between the coasts and beyond, she has captured the vast American landscape and terrain, and its intersection with civilization. Sambunaris has said that she has “an unrelenting curiosity to understand the American landscape and our place in it.” While humans are in awe of the power of nature, we are also energetic and domineering diggers, builders, and settlers. Sambunaris’s photographs thus strikingly record our ongoing, uneasy relationship with the natural world.

Through straight-on framing, precise focus, and uniform lighting, Sambunaris uses consistent photographic methods to depict diverse subject matter—from trains in Nebraska and Texas to trucks in New Jersey and Wisconsin, the oil pipeline in Alaska, uranium tailings in Utah, and steam vents in Yellowstone National Park. Her photographs at once convey the grandeur of the American landscape and the subtle, yet sometimes overpowering, cues to the country’s capitalist mentality. As she explains, “It is the anomalies of an ordinary landscape that have become the locus of my work: massive warehousing, infinite distribution facilities, and systematized shipping terminals. These numerous paradigmatic structures, I sense, portend the future of landscape and our relationship to it.”

Since October 2009, Sambunaris has photographed along the nearly 2,000 miles of territory that make up the border between Mexico and the United States. She has traveled from Brownsville, Texas to San Diego, California and back, attempting to convey a unity within the landscape, regardless of where one happens to stand. Her photographs refer to the border’s political drama through conceptual references, as in her photograph of the Rio Grande River in Big Bend National Park, where dramatic deep canyon river walls physically divide the United States and Mexico, or by documenting tangible evidence, such as the contentious border fence that separates an otherwise seamless landscape. Both photographic methods reflect the topographic beauty and the political tensions that exist along the border. www.mocp.org

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