When was the last time there was a good show at Julie Saul and Yancey Richardson? If Sambunaris doesn’t make you want to go out into America, I don’t know what will. Her last show at Yancey Yet All Remains was a jolt. Those pictures took on the terrain of Robert Adams, revealing just how visually wrong he had been, showing forty years later the west looking just as Adams had left it. The development hadn’t been perpetual, it stopped at the edge of his frames, and Sambunaris’ pictures stood to reassure us that there was still a lot of the west to see.
Sambunaris’ new work takes on the security fence between America and Mexico. Like Yet All Remains there is an odd neutrality. The pictures address the fence not as an injustice, political theater, a security necessity, or comic gesture. They just exist, extending on forever into unbelievably eloquent landscapes. To her immense credit embrace Carlton Watkins’ desire to show the beauty of America without any of the romanticism of the Hudson River School painters or, in Sambunaris, case, Ansel Adams and Audubon Calendars. But it is still odd to see Sambunaris not take more of stand on the fence’s existence. We see the traces of small homes along the fence as a train passes by, but that is as close as the work comes to touching on the fences greater significance. Then again, there is a picture from the bottom of a riverbed as the sun disappears behind towering cliffs that is so stunning it is hard to hold anything against Sambunaris’ photographs.
Through April 16th
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