Naomi White
 24.5″x18.5” Naomi White STATEMENT The socio-political ramifications of our species are ingrained in rocks. Like a camera, rocks record and bear witness to our collective past. In the gasses they trap, every environmental change is stored forever, cataloging the unending story of the destruction of our planet and its inhabitants by a dominant class. They hold an undeniable truth in a world of shifting disinformation. Rocks are alive. Excavations explores the complicated role the camera plays in our violent, troubled past and present, and the way systems of oppression perpetuate the Anthropocene. Archival images from American magazines such as Life and National Geographic reveal entrenched ideologies about race, gender, and our relationship to nature, animals, and the planet. The omnipresence of danger, and the urgency to control (the narrative, the body, the earth, the animal) found in these pages, are pervasive and loud themes. Simultaneously, magazines such as Ebony and Ms. feature activism, strategies for survival, and the importance of care, community, and hope. These are themes that do not define themselves by what they are not, but by what they can and will be. Excited by the idea that rocks hold truths in an age of disinformation, I began tearing and burning into my photographs of landscapes, layering them over and over until new spaces emerged. These fissures and cracks make room for connections between the earth and its inhabitants, between the past and future possibilities. BIO Naomi White is an abolitionist feminist, artist, and educator, working on ideas at the intersection of political ecology and photography. White is the winner of PDN’s Objects of Desire award, and a finalist for the Hopper Prize, 2023. She has exhibited throughout North America and Europe, including art fairs Scope Miami, Spectrum Miami, and Photo LA. Her work has been published in PDN, The Brooklyn Rail, Cut Me Up, FAYN, and Uncertain States. White has lectured at the Center for Ethics at Cal Poly Pomona, Santa Monica City College, and UCLA Extension. White holds an MFA in Photography and Related Media from SVA in New York, a Post Baccalaureate in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a BA in English Literature from San Francisco State. White is the faculty chair of the photography department at NYFA in Los Angeles. Teaching is an essential part of her artistic practice. She teaches classes exploring photography through theoretical and historical concerns, graduate seminars, FAYN magazine, curation, and collage. ARTIST CONTACT IMAGES  28”x21″  32″x22″  19”x13″  19”x13″ |