For more than 25 years, Victoria Sambunaris (b. 1964) has traveled across the United States creating large-format photographs that explore the evolving relationship between the land and human intervention. Rather than presenting an untouched landscape, her work reveals a terrain shaped by industry, infrastructure, and the ambitions that have defined the American experience.

As we reflect on the 250th anniversary of the United States, this exhibition offers a timely opportunity to consider that legacy. The American landscape has long symbolized promise and possibility. Yet Sambunaris’s work invites us to look more closely—at how the land has been used, transformed, too often strained, and, at times, defiled by those ambitions. Her photographs balance a profound sense of beauty with a quiet but powerful questioning of our collective responsibility for the environment.

— Ira Wagner, Guest Curator

“For many years now…I am recording anonymous modern-day monuments that have settled onto the contemporary landscape, telling a conflicted story in geographical, environmental, political and cultural terms. The photographs that I produce question traditional and clichéd notions of landscape, our place within it, and the collective roles and responsibilities in how and why we shape it the way we do.”

Victoria Sambunaris, 2024