A PRC Speaker Series presentation with Victoria Sambunaris
September 12, 2023 : 6:30 – 8:30 pm
HYBRID EVENT: In-Person at
Lesley University, University Hall screening room
lower level, 1815 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge
and online via Zoom.
For ONLINE tickets click HERE
For IN-PERSON tickets click HERE
Victoria Sambunaris photographs the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological, and industrial interventions. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad.
Sambunaris is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Radius Books Published her first monograph Taxonomy of a Landscape. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York.
“Geography – a fairly recent science – maps the relationships between the earth and its inhabitants. I think of “social geography” as a term to describe my photographic work and methodology. I isolate images of the natural world together with the superimposition of a relentless grid of human interactions and interventions. The meanings of each oscillate and are determined by the other.
The myth of America and particularly its western landscape largely underwrote the ideas of freedom and frontier independence found in much national political rhetoric and as the basis of much popular cultural imagery. Today these same landscapes are deeply charged with social interventions that contradict those mythologies and instead present a harshly pragmatic, yet sometimes sublime, and sometimes negative set of images. These mythic spaces are both aesthetically and politically linked, now inextricably. For many years now I have been on a personal quest to understand such complex landscapes and our engagement with them.”