Victoria Sambunaris
Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Nexus, an exhibition of large-scale photographs by Victoria Sambunaris. Known for her extensive projects examining the intersections of modern civilization, geology, industry, and the natural environment, in Nexus the artist investigates the crossroads of the petrochemical and industrial cargo trade, and alludes to the expansion of global markets and the intensification of fossil fuel consumption worldwide.
Following the completion of her 2009-2010 series on the US Mexico border, Sambunaris spent four years traveling from the southern border of Texas to the Permian Basin and the Gulf Coastal Plains, photographing and interviewing local residents, pipe layers, rail men, oil workers, shipping executives, fishermen, truckers, port workers and marine biologists. Her research revealed an intricate matrix linking millions of miles of roadways, rails, pipelines, docks and waterways, both above ground and beneath, interwoven to maintain the uninterrupted hum of modern consumer economy.
Minimalist and reductive, the resulting photographs present a visually nuanced portrait of a vast industrial terrain embedded within the grassy plains and estuarial corridors of the region. Nodding to the uninflected minimalism of Donald Judd and Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sambunaris details vast expanses of monochromatic oil and gas pipes stacked in open lots in preparation to be trucked, railed, and laid underground; endless lines of railway tank cars moving silently along the horizon line of an empty landscape; and multinational ships afloat the Houston Ship Channel, connecting Houston, home to the second largest petrochemical complex in the world, with markets throughout the world.
Although Sambunaris’s cool, precisely composed images do not offer political commentary, they invite consideration of man’s ineffaceable mark on the environment. As the artist writes, “The vast transportation network of the petrochemical industry, a near invisible part of a seemingly tranquil landscape, impacts the everyday lives of everyone involved, from oil riggers to Gulf Coast fishermen to consumers across the globe, interconnected and interdependent as the global economy continues its inexorable expansion.”
Born in 1964, Sambunaris graduated from the Yale University MFA program in 1999. In 2011, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery presented a ten-year survey of the artist’s work, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Nevada Museum of Art, the Rubin Center, University of Texas, El Paso and the University of Maryland. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe. In 2010 Sambunaris received the Anonymous Was a Woman Award and the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship Grant. In 2013, Radius published Taxonomy of the Landscape, a survey of ten years of work.
For visuals, please contact Alex Pigeon, apigeon@yanceyrichardson.com
| Shifting Baselines: Texas Gulf Coast Shifting Baselines: Texas Gulf Coast is a studied visual consideration of the culture, environment, and history of the Texas Gulf coast. Viewers are invited to consider their own notions and questions about landscape, our place within it, and the individual and collective involvement in shaping and stewarding it the way we do. GROUP SHOWS "Island Time: Galveston Artist Residency - The First Four Years" Contemporary Art Museum Houston, November 21, 2015 - February 14, 2016 |
Work by Victoria Sambunaris is included in the exhibition Desert Serenade: Drones, Fences, Cacti, Test Sites, Craters and Serapes, on view through August 31 at the Lannan Foundation Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. The group exhibition features work by Sambunaris, Trevor Paglen, James Turrell, Renate Aller, Subhanker Banerjee, Tom Miller, and Emi Winter. The gallery will host an artist's reception on Saturday, August 9 from 5-7pm.
Victoria Sambunaris: Taxonomy of a Landscape is on view currently at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago through March 31, 2013. A public reception with the artist will be held at the museum on February 7 from 5-7pm. The exhibition originated at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY and is generously supported by the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM.
Work by Victoria Sambunaris will feature in the upcoming exhibition, Photography in Mexico: Selected Works from the Collections of SFMOMA and Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, on display at SFMOMA from March 10 – July 8. Work from Sambunaris' acclaimed series The Border is included in the exhibition, which explores the rich and diverse tradition of Mexican and international photographers working in Mexico since the 1920s.
Victoria Sambunaris' first solo exhibition at a major American museum opened on Friday, October 21 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. Presented in conjunction with the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, NM, the exhibition, Taxonomy of a Landscape, features over forty works from the artist's wide-ranging examination of the American landscape at the intersection of civilization, geology and natural history. The exhibition also includes a comprehensive archival installation recording the artist's travels.
Gallery artists Olivo Barbieri, Mitch Epstein, and Victoria Sambunaris are included in The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, opening September 24th and running through January 8, 2012.
Gallery artists Mitch Epstein, David Hilliard, Lisa Kereszi, Andrew Moore, Alex Prager, and Victoria Sambunaris are all included in People Power Places: Reframing the American Landscape, a group exhibition at Davidson College, North Carolina, on view through March 6, 2011.
Victoria Sambunaris has been named a recipient of two major artist grants from Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation and Aaron Siskind Foundation.
For more information about the Anonymous Was A Woman Awards, click here, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation, click here.
Opening September 8, 2009, the Hermes Foundation Gallery at 63rd and Madison, NYC will present Terra Firma, an exhibition of Vicky Sambunaris's recent work exploring geologic hot spots in the American West. This summer Sambunaris was also the subject of solo exhibition an the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, NM.
Victoria Sambunaris and Christian Patterson have been nominated for the 2009 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographer. Lisa Kereszi was the 2005 recipient.