Unseen California: Language Has No Weather
Sunday, November 17, 2024 - January 11, 2025
Probably Gallery is honored to present an exhibition of the first cohort of residents from the interdisciplinary arts research initiative Unseen California. The initiative engages diverse artist voices with research themes relevant to California’s future, utilizing the University of California’s Natural Reserve System.
Language Has No Weather includes works by Mercedes Dorame, Karolina Karlic, Tarrah Krajnak, Dionne Lee, and Aspen Mays. These artists work in a variety of media with photography at the center of their practices. A book of works connected to this project will be available at the reception and is currently available for purchase online.
These five women artists took part as the inaugural group of Artist Researchers working across the California landscape. Together on this journey they create their own new artworks set out to reframe California’s cultural histories and ecological landscapes beyond canonical perspectives. The (42) UC Natural Reserve System (UCNRS) sites are locations stewarded by the University of California. The impact of the Artists -in- Residence engaging with the UCNRS generates novel opportunities for art-making and pedagogy as well as knowledge exchange for seeing new ways to engage the natural world as it relates to environmental and social justice.
Each Artist Researcher’s approach is unique and open-ended, thus creating a place for personal projects that freely diverge while challenging overarching concepts, such as “nature” and “landscape,” and address urgent discourse around California land. This long-term research initiative gives these cultural producers opportunities to carve out novel conceptual and interdisciplinary approaches to propose new understandings of the pressing issues that face California’s terrain, its ecological economies, and its bio-cultural diversities.
The artists of Unseen California aim to “see” (by means of visualization and acknowledgement) the multivalent histories that compose the California landscape. This includes indigenous stewardship and regenerative practices – on ceded and unceded land – and the role of settler colonialism and imperialism in construction of these histories. Unseen California invites artists to engage in new types of creative ecology not yet considered/addressed in full within institutional spaces and the photographic canon of Western photography.
The title of the exhibition comes from Jennifer Moxley’s Fragments of a Broken Poetics:
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Mercedes Dorame, born in Los Angeles, California, received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from UCLA. She calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of (in)visibility and ideas of cultural construction. Mercedes Dorame uses her art practice as a way to explore, reimagine, and connect to her Tongva tribal culture and bring visibility to contemporary Indigenous experience. The Tongva are the first people in what is now Los Angeles, and their territory covers the expanse from Malibu to San Bernardino to Aliso Creek and the southern Channel Islands. They have inhabited the Los Angeles basin for over eight thousand years and were officially recognized as an Indigenous tribe by the state of California in 1994. Yet they still are not recognized federally, which means that as a collective group they have limited access to federal funding and no designated reservation land.
Through a range of photographic media Karolina Karlic creates work that addresses the intersection of photography and documentary practices, with a focus on systems of labor and industry, globalization, and their impact on the social and environmental landscapes. Karlic has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, residencies, and awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Her research is dedicated to telling the stories of those persons and ecologies who have been affected by the post-modernization of the industrial world. In her research, Rubberlands, a photographic survey that maps the ways natural rubber manufacturing is socially, ecologically and systemically formed, Karlic proposes that rubber + photography are both integral components of the second phase of the industrial revolution. This research proposes that each are equal players in the development of a globalized contemporary mobile society of making and consuming. Karlic is the founding director of Unseen California and Associate Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, the Director of Graduate Studies of Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA Program and the Director of Art + Science initiatives at the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History at UCSC.
Tarrah Krajnak is an artist working across photography, performance, and poetry. She was born in Lima, Peru in 1979, and currently lives in Los Angeles. Krajnak is an Associate Professsor of Art at UCLA. She is represented by Zander Galerie, Cologne. Krajnak is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, and was recently awarded the Jury Prize of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies, and the Hariban Grand Prize, from Benrido, Kyoto, Japan. Krajnak has published three books including El Jardín De Senderos Que Se Bifurcan (DAIS 2021), Master Rituals II: Weston's Nudes (TBW 2022) and RePose (FW Books 2023). Her work was featured in recent issues of Aperture, British Journal of Photography, The Eyes Journal, and European Photography. This past year Krajnak’s work was exhibited in Corps á Corps at Centre Pompidou, Paris, Photography Now at Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Aperture's traveling exhibition You Belong Here: People, Place, & Purpose in Latinx Photography, and in the solo exhibition Shadowings at the Huis Marseille Museum of Photography, Amsterdam. Krajnak’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Pinault Collection, Paris, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, and The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC among others.
Dionne Lee works in photography, collage, and video to explore power, survival, and the conflicts that come with seeking a sense of belonging within the American landscape. Lee received an MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2017. Lee’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Princeton University Art Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, Contemporary Art Gallery of Vancouver, CA, Aperture Foundation, New York, International Center of Photography, New York, Light Work, New York, and Florida State University’s Museum of Fine Arts, and most recently the Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Aspen Mays was raised in Charleston, SC. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Anthropology and Spanish from The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is currently an Associate Professor and Chair of Photography at the California College of the Arts. She is represented by Higher Pictures Generation in New York, and recent honors include a 2021 Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mays was also a Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Chile, where she spent time with astrophysicists using the world’s most advanced telescopes to look at the sky, an experience that has made a lasting impact on her work.
