NICOLE FIACCO GALLERY
336 Warren Street
August/September 2010
Victoria Sambunaris: Terra Firma
The Nicole Fiacco Gallery is pleased to present TERRA FIRMA, a solo exhibition by photographer VICTORIA SAMBUNARIS. First exhibited in 2009 at The Gallery at Hermès in New York City, Terra Firma explores geophysical and manmade upheavals in the landscape of the American West. The large scale photographs investigate the physiographic complexity of the American West through the lens of a singular artistic vision of place and time.
For the past ten years Victoria Sambunaris has made her way across America with a 5” x 7” large format camera in the tradition of 19th century landscape photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan, Cartleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson. Sambunaris has directed her lens toward the trains in Nebraska, the pipeline of Alaska, the mines of Nevada, the calderas of Hawaii, and the cave systems in the south. Her most recent works, taken at the Yellowstone hotspot, an active super volcano, and the Snake River plain in Idaho, are a natural extension reflecting on the origins of the earth while rendering its continued evolution, violence and beauty. As Sambunaris explains, “I am captivated by the idea of how we inhabit our landscapes as we forge ahead in our development. The suggestion of what fills our lives is somehow telling and strangely consoling.”
Born in 1964, Sambunaris graduated from the Yale MFA program in 1999. Her work is
held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and the
Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, which granted her a Foundation Fellowship in Marfa,
Texas. Victoria Sambunaris is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York City.
©Victoria Sambunaris, Courtesy Nicole Fiacco Gallery, NY and Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY.