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October 13, 2018 — December 1, 2018
NORDVESTFJORD, GREENLAND #4 — Adriene Hughes
Northern Lands is a two-person photography exhibition featuring work by Amy Caterina and Adriene Hughes. Both artists recently photographed in Iceland and Greenland separately. They employ different techniques—Caterina uses Polaroid cameras accepting their inherent flaws, while Hughes uses digital with infrared technology. Both have "intuitively sewn or marked on their images as evidence of the overwhelming sensation of awe they felt."
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Amy Caterina is an artist living in Southern California who spends her days fawning over her prize-winning wiener dog Walter, growing her mohawk, and teaching the youth of America. If you ever need a photograph of an out-of-focus desert suburbia or a giant cupcake bunker (free instructions on how to survive the apocalypse!), she's your gal.
Amy received her BFA in Photography from Buffalo State College and her MFA in Photography from CSU Fullerton.
She is an Adobe Certified Teacher and Education Leader. She teaches History of Photography, Digital Photography, and Digital Darkroom at Palomar College in San Marcos, where she is the head of the Photography department.
This series of Polaroids is a continuation of the portfolio I began in January 2017. My first residency at the Fish Factory in East Iceland was in the winter, when the light appeared dimly between 11 a.m.–4 p.m. and then settled into the dark. I returned to the residency this June to experience the endless days of light. The quality of light was as unnerving and foreign as my first visit, but this time had an uneasy luminosity that shone continuously for my two-week stay.
This portfolio is a study of the light, and how a place can be defined in a non-representational manner. The stitch work grounds the images of a landscape that felt overpowering in scale and dominance. I am interested in how the tactile markings and thread draw attention to the image's surface and work with the compositional elements to create a new topography. The landscape is its own foreign language with its own ubiquitous power—something there as its own element that's not easy to define, and you have to be sensitive enough to acknowledge it. This work is also a collaboration: between a 45-year-old camera and myself, the necessary beauty of imperfections, and the permission to play.
Adriene Hughes is a San Diego–based fine art photographer with an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University. She is a multimedia artist whose current body of work is based within the genre of grand landscape and the effects of global warming on the environment through the use of infrared technology, photography, video, and multimedia installation.
She is a finalist in Critical Mass 2018, has recently exhibited at Klompching Gallery in New York, and is the recipient of the 2018 Rhonda Wilson Award. Her photographs have been featured in Lenscratch, Humble Arts Foundation, Don't Take Pictures, PDN, Phroom Magazine, PhotoPhore, Feature Shoot, German Foto Magazine, and Crusade for Art. She is currently preparing for a large-scale photographic project at the San Diego International Airport.
The Resonance of Loss
I know this is unconventional to Western thought, but I believe in reincarnation. Like the Buddhists, I think we live life over and over again, until we get it right. The Arctic zones, Russia, and frozen, cold lands resonate as a place I felt connected to. Ever since I was a child, I felt the Arctic in my bones.
Surviving cancer is also a part of my history. Cancer took all I had, and a part of me died and was reborn, so going to frozen landscapes—signifiers of my ancestral home—was a way to experience a part of my ancient self as I struggled to regain my creative powers post-cancer.
Visiting the Arctic was also a way for me to connect to the calming, sublime aspect of nature, as my mind and soul needed to heal, in addition to my body. On the top of the world, in the far North, there is no sound but the wind. Occasionally, one might see a migratory bird, but other than that, there is nothing but an expansive landscape of tundra and ice.
This project lives in four distinct chapters, and each codifies the experience of the places I've explored. Each is marked by geometric patterns (either hand-sewn or marked through illustration) to demonstrate the way wind, language, and memory travel, carving into icebergs the stories of the past, present, and future. Geometric pattern mirrors the sacred viewpoints of indigenous and religious practices throughout time, viewing the earth as sacred.
Lacking noticeable objects in the landscape, we are left with nothing but shapes, color, and light. All of which combined to affect my mood, and to impact my emotions, which I hope comes through in my work.
Let me be clear: this land is in jeopardy. The warming of the Earth is shape-shifting the structure and balance of our collective ecosystem, and the threat to all living species is real. Greenland is melting at an alarming rate, and with it our future. I feel the urgency, and I want you to feel it as well, to be called into action, to think of our footprint on this earth as a serious consequence of all that we do.
Making these images healed me. My time in the landscape, and the act of photographing it, has brought me back to life, and more than anything, I want to honor and respect the nature that made me, before it's gone.
