Durham Arts Council’s Allenton Gallery

120 Morris St. Downtown Durham

September 30 - November 21, 2022, with a Third Friday reception on October 21, 6-8pm.

New work from 2020 DAC Emerging Artist grantee Cindy Waszak Geary.

My ancestors drew me to landscapes they inhabited before and after their immigration from Europe to this continent during the 17th, 19th, and 20th centuries. I traveled to and photographed these landscapes in the Netherlands, Germany, and England, on one side of the Atlantic, and on the other, to Virginia, Iowa, New York, and North Carolina. In those places I often felt a quiet knowing inside myself that specific ancestors had been where I was standing, sensing their presence in the present as I felt the hard edges of my linear sense of time dissolve. I aimed to re-create these time-shifting experiences –printing landscape images on fabric to give them the emotional resonances of memory, sometimes merging vintage ancestor portraits in multiple physical layers. Image fragments and unfinished edges suggest the piecemeal and dreamlike quality of memory. I left work uncovered by glass to allow viewers to experience the materiality of the pieces directly. To begin my reckoning with the genocide of Indigenous people who lived on the landscapes my ancestors settled, I name the disappeared Indigenous nations in the descriptions of relevant pieces.