Imag[in]ing America

Jennifer Garza-Cuen

IMAG[IN]ING AMERICA

Our society treats place as a central identifying characteristic, second only to name and followed closely by profession. We all have a catalogue of images in our mind that we call upon when a city, town, or country's name is mentioned and those images help us to form an opinion of place, and those we meet from there. 

What is it that makes us ‘of’ a place? As a former American expatriate and one who has lived my adult life essentially placeless this is a central question in my work. In my ongoing project Imag[in]ing America, I am interested in investigating national, regional, and local identities as well as ideas of otherness as they relate to place and documentary photography in America. 

Photographs have the ability to expand and compress time. They speak of what was, what is, and what will be. We look to photographs to remember and often reenact what we see, pushing old images into the future. Imag[in]ing America depicts a series of locations in the United States as a residue of cultural memory, an inheritance. It is a metaphorical memoir, a narrative re-telling of facts and fictions and a discovery of the dreamland that still is America.

Bio

Jennifer Garza-Cuen is an artist from the Pacific Northwest. Currently Associate Professor of Photography in the Department of Art + Design at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, she received her MFA in photography and MA in the History of Art and Visual Culture with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her BA summa cum laude in comparative literature was completed at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Garza-Cuen is the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Photography, the Robert Rauschenberg Residency Award, and the British Journal of Photography and 1854 Media’s Female in Focus Award. Additionally, she has received fellowships to attend residencies at Light Work, Ucross, Oxbow, Hambidge, Brush Creek, and the Vermont Studio Center. Public collections include Light Work, The Do Good Fund, the New Mexico History Museum and The Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and published in contemporary photographic journals such as Dear Dave, Contact Sheet, Musée, Papiers Paris, Blink, PDN, NR Magazine UK, Der Greif Germany, The Photo Review, and Conveyor as well as on-line journals such as: i-D, Feature Shoot, Aint-Bad, Fubiz, iGNANT, Dazed, and Juxtapoz. Garza-Cuen’s forthcoming monograph, Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg, in collaboration with Odette England will be published by Radius Books summer 2021.

In a social space: this photographer’s eye

by Karen A Terrey

“I believe great art is like bypass surgery. It allows us to go around all of the psychological distancing mechanisms that turn people cold to the most vulnerable among us.” – Lin Manuel Miranda, The Atlantic

The Melhop Gallery º7077 in Zephyr Cove is not easy for me to find, partly because I’m navigationally challenged. The first day I visit, I circle the parking lot. Once I enter, I am struck with the welcome of tall ceilings and white, sunlit walls. I literally breathe a sigh of relief at the opportunity to slowly absorb, in such a clean space for art, the solo exhibit Imag[in]ing America, featuring the photography of artist Jennifer Garza-Cuen.

Facing me is a large grey and white toned photograph of a dilapidated federal style building in Detroit. Broken windows of lace-like glass mirror the tall rows of winter-dead tufted grasses in snow in the landscaped foreground. I admire the delicateness of the architecture, how the photography suggests the building could have been made of ice. When I walk closer, I wonder how the photographer’s juxtaposition accomplishes the suggestion, some parallel between the snow-covered bent grass tufts planted in a controlled plan with the stone and concrete architecture with columns of windows. Garza-Cuen says “photographs have the ability to expand and compress time. They speak of what was, what is, and what will be. We look to photographs to remember and often reenact what we see, pushing old images into the future.” Does this building serve as a warning of a future, or a lesson of a past?

Gallery curator and owner Frances Melhop and I stand before this particular piece. We toss out descriptors almost breathlessly: power, hubris, waste, decay, nature, cycles, beauty. I ask myself are these photographs taken after, or before, the moment of consequence? So many of these subjects, the people in the photographs, appear to be almost defiantly claiming their present, and implicitly their past and future as well. This contrast between hard and soft, order and chaos, innocence and experience, human-built and natural, time and place, is reflected in the faces and scenes of Garza-Cuen's photographs.

“Jennifer’s photography is meticulous with each aspect carefully considered. A dead bird on a side table, this square of color at the edge, the way a snake curls just so near the dress hem. The work was originally ordered by geography,” Melhop says, “but with this installation we reordered the images and let go of that control and in the process discovered new connections. The juxtapositions make a new story for the viewer.” The print quality is beautiful with pigment ink on thick tactile fiber rag paper. Many images are unframed, they float from the spare white walls with magnets emphasizing their objectness. They investigate the objectness of Americana, and in some pieces the photographer has peered into a frame within a frame. A TV set framed by curtains on a wall framed by crowded taxidermy.

After wandering alone from photograph to photograph, taking in the staged details, trying to observe with a level of specificity worthy of this photographer’s eye, at last I’m overwhelmed. The images make me uncomfortable. I cannot passively observe. I must feel and respond. The subjects stare at me as if saying, judge me if you will but don’t look away from me.

I sit in a pale wooden chair in the front room before 12 photographs installed in a grid on the wall ahead of me. Behind me the windows are paned in rectangles and the sun is projecting the shadows of clouds onto the floor, as if they float on the surface of water.

To my right, a large photograph captures the black-green rippled water of a pond and the white body of a young woman floating naked, eyes closed, mouth open, auburn hair wrapping around her tricep. On my left, a girl stands alone in a wide rural empty road that curves behind her, like her curling hair, like the snake wrapped in her wrists and draping down to tip under the hem of her dress. The girl stares straight at me.

I’m a poet, and I felt intimidated when I was asked to write a perspective essay for Garza-Cuen’s Imag[in]ing America exhibition at the Melhop gallery. I’ve known Jennifer for years, we both participated in the Reno Art Salon with a vibrant group of artists of diverse mediums. As a literary artist I love collaborating with visual artists, seeing through our interdisciplinary lenses each other’s work. 

"I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing," wrote John Cage in his book Silence.

I think what poets and photographers share with their viewers is the question, what does it mean? In my own experience as a poet and teacher, people read a poem or listen to a poem and then look up wide-eyed and anxious that they must now be able to answer that question. I don’t know what Garza-Cuen’s photographs mean. There, I said it. My biggest fear about writing this essay is out there in text now. So, what can I contribute to the conversation? When I stand in front of these photographs, I’m asking myself, what do I share with them.

Do I recognize myself in that lost and defiant girl’s face, as she stands in a pink dress by the wooden bus station bench, an awful awful burger in her hand and at her feet spread out upon open newspapers, fast food cartons? Is that her sister or perhaps a young mother lying down on the bench, appearing bored, looking up at the ceiling? What are they waiting for, alone? Why are they wearing such delicate dresses?

Are we looking for, as viewers, something we lost before we were able to truly comprehend the loss it would become later on for us? What am I trying to re-discover in this scene, to save myself? As viewers, in some ways we have the benefit of knowing what the future has held, like a premonition, but that at the time of the photo, remained a mystery.

I’ve always been guided by this idea that a poem is not complete without its reader. The poet, the speaker, and the reader collaborate in a created social space. In these photographs, I feel the presence of the photographer, the subject, and myself. Maybe in photographs of people, we always experience the illicitness of the voyeur. In these photographs, most of the subjects look brazenly at me. Not back at me. They are looking at me first, hand and fingers poised arrogantly with a cigarette. I imagine they have already considered why they are being photographed, and why they want to be in this photograph. The young woman in the thin white nightdress standing in a sandy creek among dead tree branches and black trunks. The girl holding the snake hugged to her chest, staring into the camera. Behind her looms unknown forest and the chalky whiteness of a road into nowhere. But I’d guess this girl knows these woods and where this road goes.

Even the sheep in a photograph inside the frame of an older painting, look at me from their pastoral idyl, as if asking, are you making me into something? Why do you think you know me?

The poet Myung Mi Kim in Commons wrote, "The poem may be said...to mobilize the notion of our responsibility to one another in a social space" These photographs loudly protest any attempt to step away from my complicity. Within these photographs, the scenes are social spaces, and a second layer of social space within the gallery is created by me standing in front them. If I begin sharing my response with another viewer, the social space is expanded again. The artist Paul Celan said, I see no difference between a handshake and a poem. Art creates this human handshake, a vulnerable interaction, a meeting, a touching, a risk.

Jennifer Garza-Cuen’s photography challenges me to take this risk, to resist turning away or coolly distancing myself, from the vulnerability of her subjects. And her subjects are the varied citizens of our society, fuller in their complexities than any “central identifying characteristic” used to catalogue a place or idea of other. These images tell stories that make me question what I know as true, what I am familiar with, my assumptions of what I am seeing.

Karen Terrey

Bio

Karen A. Terrey is a writer, editor, and writing coach, offering marketing and business writing, copy editing, manuscript review and publishing guidance, and creative writing workshops in Truckee through her business Tangled Roots Writing for clients of all ages.  She has taught at Lake Tahoe Community College, Sierra Nevada College, and Sierra College and has served as a poetry editor for the literary journals Pitkin Review and Quay. She is a recipient of a Sierra Arts Endowment Grant, the John Woods Scholarship to Prague Summer Program, the Steve Turner Scholarship to Surprise Valley Writer's Conference, and a scholarship to the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems have appeared in Rhino, Edge, Meadow, WordRiot, Puerto Del Sol, Wicked Alice, Canary, and Gray Sparrow Journal, among others. Her poetry chapbook Bite and Blood is available from Finishing Line Press and local bookstores, including Sundance Books in Reno, NV and Word After Word in Truckee, CA.