THE LAY OF YOUR LAND – NANCY DUFF

MAIN SPACE EXHIBITION
APRIL 4 – APRIL 26, 1997
RECEPTION: FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 1997 AT 8 PM
ARTIST TALK: SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 1997 AT 2 PM

 

EXHIBITION INFORMATION

THE LAY OF YOUR LAND is a solo exhibition of mixed-media works reflecting on southern California from an invisible / alien / outsider perspective. The exhibition invokes the purposes of traditional landscape painting, pointing out the impossibility of looking being a way of owning for women or other marginalized subjectivities. Duff investigates intersections of geography, landscape, and feminism through the relationship of her body to aerial photographs of southern California. The photographs are enlarged and cropped without vanishing points or horizons. The artist inscribes her identity through a correlating series of portraits of Canadian pennies, referring to the “bad penny” that infiltrates the culture and economy. The work challenges the cultural values inscribed through the constructs of geography and landscape, proposing instead that these constructs are received asymmetrically upon embodied subjects, and are implicated in the imperialist project of colonization. Furthermore, this exhibition is about the constitution of subjectivity—as much determined by the place from which we speak, as in opposition to the other—on both interpersonal and international registers. A take-away card completes the work, which is as much a love letter to the artist’s partner as a mediation on Canada-US relations.