FLATS, Houston’s artist-run photo lab/darkroom/roving art gallery, has been a crucial site of experimentation in the world of Southern photography since its inception in 2016. Transient Vistas, the lab’s latest pop-up exhibition curated by FLATS founder Jessi Bowman, calls tradition into question. Irene Antonia Diane Reece, Lorena Molina, Stephanie Cuyubamba Kong, Margaux Crump and Jake Eshelman explore the interconnected nature of land and family and how the customs we create change with our environment.
Enter an 8,000-square-foot warehouse in Houston’s East End. The exhibition opens with Para Mi Luz, (2021-ongoing) by Irene Antonia Diane Reece, who, after spending much of the past couple of years working to build archives of Houston’s historically Black neighborhoods, has turned her lens back to her family archive. Inspired by the phrase “for my light” written on the back of images in her maternal grandfather’s archive, the photographic installation incorporates wooden furniture, a gold-framed bed, quilted textiles, and framed film photographs that beam with the intimacy and nostalgia found inside the home of an elder. Images of her mother, photos of the artist as a young girl along with her grandmother, and a poem converge into an homage to her Mexican heritage. Through this work, the artist evokes the spirit of her grandfather and the family traditions she holds close for future transmission.
Like Reece’s meditations on the spiritual power of her family archive, Stephanie Cuyubamba Kong’s images and small altar-like sculptures cite her longing for her parent’s homeland of Peru. Nearby, Lorena Molina celebrates the immigrant experience through playfully arranged still-life photographs filled with inside jokes. The framed images are accented by a canopied web of multicolored rope, symbolizing her journey through the US after leaving El Salvador.
Margaux Crump and Jake Eshelman’s Well Beings, (2022-2024) culminate two months of field research on sacred springs throughout Wales in the United Kingdom. The multi-sensory installation comprises a series of microscopic images that cascade from the ceiling, rest willingly on the concrete floor, and float in small vessels of water waiting to be submerged. Separate ends of a short knotted rope conjoin two hefty vessels; one filled with Holy water from Wales, the other with a bacterial, debris-filled water sample taken directly from the Houston Bayou. A damaged tree found near the Bayou after Hurricane Beryl floats above a circle of salt protected by candles filled with raw honey from the area. Steeped in ritual and lore, the project is an ode to the history of the groundskeepers who cared for these sacred healing sites before Christianity flooded the area and altered the people’s relationship with the land. The artist duo juxtaposes the ancient land practices of Wales with Houston’s disregard for the significance of its proximity to the Gulf and reputation as a “Bayou City.”
With differing cultural backgrounds and investigations, the artists in Transients Vistas push the boundaries of photography beyond two dimensions into immersive experiences that grapple with fragmented cultural identities, the loss of ritual, migration, and the land.
Transient Vistas is on view at FLATS through September 29, 2024.
