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Shifting Baselines: Texas Gulf Coast
Victoria Sambunaris
November 28th, 2015 through February 6th, 2016

Victoria Sambunaris is a project-based photographer who each year structures her life around a photographic journey crossing the American West, equipped with a 5x7 wooden field camera, camping gear, and a switchblade securely fastened to her boot.  Her large-scale photos of the contemporary American landscape tell a conflicted story in geographic, economic, political and cultural terms.  Over the last fifteen years Vicky has journeyed to Alaska, venturing 500 miles on a gravel road, crossing the Arctic Circle to arrive in the North Slope; encircled and penetrated enormous mining operations, mesmerized by the vast cavity on the earth; resided on an abandoned air force base on the salt flats of Utah exploring the industry and history of the area; voyaged the I-80 corridor driving 11,000 miles striving to grasp the force of the land’s evolution and our place within it; surveyed the pervasive Yellowstone hotspot and Snake River Plain observing evidence of this volatile area’s violent geologic past; and traversed 20,000 miles along the 2000 mile border between the US and Mexico over 8 months in an attempt to comprehend the essence of the border culture and a landscape divided.  In 2014 GAR invited Vicky to Galveston, where she spent the last year, to continue her examination of the thriving trade and energy industries so integral to this region.

In each location Vicky’s process begins with an unmitigated curiosity inspired by research into industry, culture, history, anthropology, geology and ecology.  She travels with an extensive library of books, maps and reference material and has amassed an abundance of artifacts that include mineral specimen, journals, video footage, road logs, and oral histories from her journeys.  She strives to integrate herself into the locale she is working in.  While in Galveston Vicky began a collaboration with Kristopher Benson of NOAA to develop the work on view in Shifting Baselines: Texas Gulf Coast.  The show brings together their unique perspectives on the industry and culture of the Texas Gulf coast – from Kris comes a scientific/didactic/empirical understanding of how certain locations have been affected by people and industry; from Vicky a visual/aesthetic interpretation of place which is critical for engaging the viewer in the important conservation and restoration projects undertaken by NOAA and other natural resource managers in the context of the heavily industrialized Galveston port and other parts of the Texas Gulf coast from Port Arthur down to Brownsville.

Shifting Baselines: Texas Gulf Coast is a look at the politics, culture, environment, and history of the Texas Gulf coast.  Viewers can create their own notions and meanings including questions about landscape, our place within it, and the collective roles and responsibilities in how and why we shape it the way we do.

Victoria Sambunaris received her MFA from Yale University in 1999.  She is a recipient of the 2010 Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship and the 2010 Anonymous Was a Woman Award. In 2011, a twelve-year survey of her work was exhibited at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, and currently the Rubin Center at the University of Texas El Paso.  Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Lannan Foundation. Radius Books recently published her first monograph Taxonomy of a Landscape. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York.

The GAR Gallery would like to give special thanks to the following people for their help in making Shifting Baselines: Texas Gulf Coast possible:

Kristopher Benson, NOAA Restoration Center.

Jim Ditty, Juan Salas & Shawn Hillen of NOAA Fisheries, Galveston Laboratory Fishery Ecology Branch.

Dave Baca of Texas A&M University at Galveston, Jack K. Williams Library.

Andy Sipocz, Bill Irwin & Scott Triebes of Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site.

Boyd Bilhovde & Hilary Swarts of US Fish & Wildlife Service, Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge.

Troy Bellmyer, Gulf Coast Waste Disposal Authority.
2521 Ships Mechanic Row | Galveston, TX 77550 | info@galvestonartistresidency.org |