CLOSING RECEPTION: Sunday, June 12, 2002 / 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Excavations is Naomi White’s first solo show with Keystone Art Space gallery. White’s recent photographic series explores the complex relationship photography has with colonialism and capitalism.
The effects of our species, our traces, our stories, are written into rocks. Like a camera, they record our delusional drive towards extinction, and bear witness to our collective past. Rocks are alive.
EXCAVATIONS explores the way systems of oppression perpetuate the Capitalocene, and the complicated role the camera plays in our violent, racist past and present. Photographs permeate our ideas about ourselves and our place in the world, fermenting world views. Excavating images from American magazines from the 1940’s to the present, from Life to Ebony and beyond, reveals deeply entrenched ideologies about race, gender, our relationship to nature, animals, and the planet.
Photographs permeate our ideas about ourselves and the world. Our experience is often radically different from how it is represented in the media. Photographs are good at showing what things look like, which is not the same as how things feel. Employing collage, a tool for reshaping the world to better reflect our experience of it, White conjures a new world out of the rubble. Photography is an act, a way to process an unrecognizably tormented world going to pieces, and offer hope. Excavations recognizes buried histories while constructing new possibilities through remixing, intervening and fire.
Though we may feel surrounded by exclusion and oppression, it’s important to engage with the world we want to live in, to be compelled to act with a multiplicity of voices, to seek out joy as both resistance and healing.
White is the winner of PDN’s Objects of Desire award, and a recipient of the Jentel Artist Residency. She has exhibited throughout North America and Europe, including Scope, Miami, Photo LA and Camp Gallery. Her work has been published in PDN, The Brooklyn Rail, Village Voice, Cut Me Up Magazine, The Missouri Literary Review, and Uncertain States. White holds an MFA in Photography and Related Media from SVA in New York, a Post Baccalaureate in Photography from the San Francisco Art institute, and a BA in English Literature from San Francisco State. White is currently the Faculty Chair of Photography at the Photo Arts Conservatory at NYFA in Los Angeles.