Artist Statement
In 1995 I began crossing the US-Mexico regularly over a period of three years while working on another project. A few years later I was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Israel at a time that coincided with the outbreak of the 2nd Intifada. These two distinct experiences folded together in the spring of 2009 - the same year that commemorated the 20th anniversary of the felling of the Berlin Wall - when I returned once again to the US-Mexico border region to live and work to witness first hand the dramatic changes to that landscape with the installation of the new border fence.

This project examines the complex relationships between personal, cultural and natural histories. Through constructs of time, and in landscape as trace of socio-cultural interaction, the project is informed by the decadal changes in these varying geographies, a period of time that saw the construction of physical barriers between states, and their accompanying expressions of power. In photographing landscapes that have been repurposed to articulate division - familiar and foreign, contemporary and historic - this project resists a metaphoric collapse in favor of a parallel reading.

With images from present-day Berlin functioning as both prologue and epilogue, the combined works present differing constructions of subjectivity in relation to borders and bordering.

 

 

Terri Warpinski has been a professor of photography at the University of Oregon since 1984. Her B.A. degree is from the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay, and she holds an M.A. and M.F.A from the University of Iowa. Her research and creative practice in its various forms persists in its exploration of relationships between personal, cultural and natural histories. Helen A. Harrison of The New York Times has written of Warpinski’s landscape work: “She is especially attuned to the often subtle evidence of human impact on nature. . . . (Her work) invite(s) speculation about the secrets that may be revealed by close scrutiny and creative speculation.” While Natasha Egan, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago writes about recent Warpinski’s recent documentary projects, “By seamlessly juxtaposing two or three images together, Terri Warpinski's Surface Tension looks at both physical and psychological barriers…”. And of the same group of work, Stamatina Gregory, and independent curator in New York writes, “In photographing two sets of landscapes that have been repurposed to articulate division—one familiar, one foreign—she resists a metaphoric collapse of the two, instead providing a parallel reading. Both series present radically different constructions of subjectivity in relation to the border, yet are analogous in their movements between the seeming intractability of geopolitics and its inevitable change—its escalation or demise—over time.”

Her work continues to be widely exhibited in galleries, institutions, and international festivals including such venues as the Pingyao International Festival of Photography in China; the US Embassy in Jerusalem; Houston International Fotofest; the Oregon Biennial at Portland Art Museum; Center for Photography at Woodstock; and the University of the Arts Philadelphia. Warpinski served two terms as Chair of the national board of directors (2000-2008) for the Society for Photographic Education, held a residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to Israel 2000-2001. She is included in many permanent collections, has had numerous works commissioned or acquired through the State of Oregon % for Public Art Program.