A lay of a land surveys a contemplative landscape. As a point of orientation and point of departure, one might consider Victor Hugo Green’s Green Book. This contemplative landscape grapples with a common presumed feat of photography, depictions of truth and fact. This lay of a land is evidence of how plantations no longer harvest cash crops from free labor but consumables from cheap labor; how the implications of colonialism is so deeply embedded in our social landscape that it simultaneously becomes an empty, loaded signifier; how a city can have no body but a soul; or the possibility of places where money can, in fact, “grow” on trees.

The exhibition consists of works on paper rendered through various modes of translation including drawings, archival pigment prints, cyanotypes and gelatin silver prints. Having traveled, lived and observed, experience provides instruction on how to read a lay of a land. Through similarity and contrast, one starts to see where things are the same or different, both, geographically and historically, and learns where to go, or where not to go, not through explicit instruction, but through a visceral recognition of semiotics, signifiers and history.