Past Exhibition - September 27, 2018
In her most recent series, The Trip Beautiful, Sara Ferguson creates a visual journal of her travels throughout North America and Europe, with a focus on her home state of California. She explores the contrast between rural and urban landscapes and the juxtaposition of grand and modest settings.
Its content relates to travel, history, memory and nostalgia, the ways that societies interact with the landscape, and the artifacts of that use. Its structure seeks to tell the story of a place--the links between past and present, and the connections between one place and another.
The Trip Beautiful serves as a metaphor for exploring our environments in meaningful ways, whether they be exotic or the everyday.
"Many different kinds of truths can be told of a place. The changes that a landscape displays visually reflect not only what is there but what has been lost, it's value dependent on what it affords us. I rarely have any prior connection to the places I photograph but there is a familiarity in them. A past intimacy with that kind of place that makes me feel like I belong there. Details give form to personal histories, structures provide references for memories, and specific landscapes allow for a universal language about loss and hope, truth and beauty. Photography lets me participate in places I would not have reason to interact in otherwise, to form associations where there were none before, and encourages an attentiveness to the world and my position in it."
By Sara Ferguson