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Field notes from Unseen California
Aspen Mays, Dionne Lee, Karolina Karlic, Mercedes Dorame and Tarrah Krajnak

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 19, 6–8 pm.
October 19, 2023 — January 15, 2024

Related Programming: Panel discussion | Saturday, October 21, 1 pm | Kindly RSVP
with Aspen Mays, Karolina Karlic and Mercedes Dorame. Moderated by Shana Lopes, Assistant Curator of Photography, SFMOMA.

The discussion will center on the artists’ experience as the an inaugural cohort of the arts research initiative Unseen California. This event includes the launch of a limited edition portfolio of risograph prints by the imprint theretherenow and Unseen California.

The panel discussion/ portfolio launch is in-person and Free to attend.

Penumbra Foundation is pleased to present Field notes from Unseen California, a group exhibition by the inaugural cohort of the arts research initiative Unseen California. Beginning in 2021, the five artists– Aspen Mays, Dionne Lee, Karolina Karlic, Mercedes Dorame and Tarrah Krajnak, have engaged with the public land of the University of California Natural Reserve System and each other through shared dialogues and personal projects developed from research at the reserves. Stewarded by the University of California, these reserves form the largest network of field stations in the world and until now have been used primarily for scientific research, not as places for art-making.

In their ongoing interdisciplinary work, exhibited for the first time, the artists of Unseen California respond to the role photography has played in defining attitudes toward the iconic Western landscape by its omission of multi-valent histories embedded in the land. The dominant canon of American landscape photography is inextricable from a colonial orientation to the land and its resources: from the photographic surveys of the 19th century, to the “untouched” vistas depicted in the 20th century, and later the encroaching sprawl of the built environment documented in New Topographics. Rather, the artists here propose new epistemologies and ways of belonging

This exhibition is curated by Aspen Mays. The Unseen California research initiative is founded by Karolina Karlic and Joseph Gallegos and has been supported by UCSC’s OpenLab UC Placemaking Initiative and the Arts Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz. epistemologies and ways of belonging with the natural world.

Eschewing sweeping views and the timelessly fixed horizon – the most emblematic and awe-inspiring tropes of command over the land – the artists’ gaze focuses instead on the earthly ground to render the sensuality of palpable connection. If the missing horizon is disorienting, Unseen California suggests a consideration of their current inquiries as field notes: embodied observations that serve as witness to the natural world in various states of becoming.

In Karlic's video Passages, a landscape scorched by forest fire erodes, moves, and re-forms as ashen soil and creatures renegotiate their territories. Dorame and Mays depict and trace the survivance of animals that share the land and the porosity of where they dwell. Krajnak and Lee walk along the ground, wayfinding across the visible topography and invisible knowledge hidden beneath their feet. These activities and strategies are framed by what the artists propose as "soft boundaries'' – describing a California landscape as unfixed and in flux. With recognition that their endeavors cannot be disentangled from the past, they offer another way of seeing.

To read the Curatorial Text by Unseen California, please click here.

To download the Press Release click here.

This exhibition is curated by Aspen Mays.
The Unseen California research initiative is founded by Karolina Karlic and Joseph Gallegos and has been supported by UCSC’s OpenLab UC Placemaking Initiative and the Arts Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

About Unseen California

Unseen California engages the public land of California as an outdoor artist studio and classroom laboratory by inviting artists to collaborate in research and create site specific art.
unseencalifornia.com

About the artists

Dionne Lee is a visual artist working in photography, collage, sculpture, and video. Her work explores power and personal history in relation to the American landscape, and interrogates historical narratives that exist within photographic representations of land and place. Lee received her MFA from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Feria Material, Mexico City; New Orleans Museum of Art; Aperture Foundation, New York; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; and the San Francisco Arts Commission, among others. Lee was a 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the Chinati Foundation and is a 2021–2023 Artist-in-Residence with Unseen California.
dionneleestudio.com

Through a range of photographic media, Karolina Karlic, creates work that widely 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 is the executive director and co-founder of Unseen California, co-founded with cinematographer Joseph Angel Gallegos, a multi-faceted arts research initiative at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where Karlic serves as an Associate Professor of Photography. Karlic was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011. Her work has been published by the New York Times, The New Yorker, Aperture, IMA Magazine, amongst others.
karolinakarlic.com

Mercedes Dorame is a visual artist based in her Tovaangar (Los Angeles) homelands. She calls on her learned and ancestral connections to explore the problematics of (in)visibility and cultural construction in collaboration with the land and cosmos to empower the expansion of perception, experience, and imagination. Dorame completed a commission for the Getty Center in 2023 and has received grants from Creative Capital and the Eiteljorg Museum, among others. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is part of the permanent collections of several institutions, including the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts.
mercedesdorame.com

Tarrah Krajnak is an artist working across photography, poetry and performance. She was born in Lima, Peru in 1979, and is currently based in Eugene, OR. Krajnak is represented by Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne. She was awarded the Jury Prize of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, Center for Documentary Studies, and the Hariban Grand Prize, Kyoto. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Pinault Collection, Paris, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Krajnak’s solo exhibition Shadowings is currently on view at the Huis Marseille Museum, Amsterdam. The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of her project RePose by FW Books.
tarrahkrajnak.co

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 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.
aspenmays.com