Shallow Seas
Chelsea Mosher
$100
Chelsea Mosher
$100
13" x 9-1/2", 64 pages
Archival pigment prints, custom copper band
Images: Chelsea Mosher
Design: Justin James Reed, Kelsey Dusenka
2018
The pictures in Shallow Seas were made in many places over several years within the Mojave and Colorado deserts. What does it mean to make pictures of, in, from, and for a place, to describe aspects of, like circles intersecting, but not as precise as a Venn diagram. The larger place is the California desert, as the circles accumulate there are specific deserts, geological traces, complex ecologies, fan palm oases, and my ever-deepening experiences within all of these sites. Standing here, standing there, this place is mediated through my relationship with photography. One aspect can be in the slippery middle at any given time. A shift places something else at the center. It’s not about owning or defining a place so as to possess it through pictures, but rather, a desire to honor these singular intersections in time, slices too tiny to account for in the breadth of the geological. A picture just to be there for a fraction of a second, a desire to be in it for days, to go again and again, year after year, and the attempt to make sense of something I first came to know through photographs; to picture it without naming it.
A picture in the mind for refuge, safely, shelter, shade, a stop-over, a still resting place.
Public Collections:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Special Collections Library
Archival pigment prints, custom copper band
Images: Chelsea Mosher
Design: Justin James Reed, Kelsey Dusenka
2018
The pictures in Shallow Seas were made in many places over several years within the Mojave and Colorado deserts. What does it mean to make pictures of, in, from, and for a place, to describe aspects of, like circles intersecting, but not as precise as a Venn diagram. The larger place is the California desert, as the circles accumulate there are specific deserts, geological traces, complex ecologies, fan palm oases, and my ever-deepening experiences within all of these sites. Standing here, standing there, this place is mediated through my relationship with photography. One aspect can be in the slippery middle at any given time. A shift places something else at the center. It’s not about owning or defining a place so as to possess it through pictures, but rather, a desire to honor these singular intersections in time, slices too tiny to account for in the breadth of the geological. A picture just to be there for a fraction of a second, a desire to be in it for days, to go again and again, year after year, and the attempt to make sense of something I first came to know through photographs; to picture it without naming it.
A picture in the mind for refuge, safely, shelter, shade, a stop-over, a still resting place.
Public Collections:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Special Collections Library