Traces of the Manifest
Victoria Sambunaris
On view: October 24 – December 15, 2024
Artist lecture, reception, and book signing: Friday, November 22, 2024
Related workshop: Masterclass with Victoria Sambunaris
November 23 – 24, 2024 | Saturday 9am-4pm & Sunday 12:30-4:30pm
Traces of the Manifest encompasses photographs, ephemera and video made by Victoria Sambunaris between 2015 and 2023. The exhibition uncovers new meanings and alternative perceptions beyond Sambunaris’ well-known or customary large-scale murals of American landscape which examine the external imprint from deep time to human time. By showing artifacts, found objects and photographs this exhibition reveals the working method, perceptions, intimacies and even unconscious views that are part of the essential and incidental elements of Sambunaris’ work as a photographer and explorer. Photographs from the Texas Gulf Coast to the desert regions of southern California reveal three dimensions of the animating forces behind Sambunaris’ larger concerns: the impact of industrial sites, geological forces and human traces found in landscape today. The intimate scale of this exhibition has given Sambunaris the opportunity to include journals, road logs, gifts, mineral collections, books, and snapshot documentation to reveal a personal story of her time on the road.
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 soon to be released Transformation of a Landscape. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in NY.
Website
This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of 4 Culture.
