Artist Statement
Sonoma County in California’s redwood biome, and in particular the town of Guerneville, has a landscape whose face has been surfaced and resurfaced generation after generation by the force of human ingenuity and desire. For me, it is a place that is both the physical manifestation of the terminus of manifest destiny and the industrial revolution. An act of Congress in 1916, we legislated away manifest destiny toward a culture of conservancy, with photographs by William Henry Jackson and Yellowstone as evidence of the need for protection. But for the Redwoods of Sonoma County, it came long after San Francisco had been built twice with the timbers of old-growth Coastal Redwood and Giant Sequoia. Today’s Sonoma County is a blend of conserved state and regional parks, wine producers, camping resorts, and the a diverse population of local year-round residents who keep these industries afloat. Much of the work has focused on this area, and other attractions in surrounding counties.
Process Statement
I'm always looking, and sometimes, when I'm really lucky I see something that needs to be photographed. I don't know how else to describe it. Pictures happen.
Colleen Mullins (@colleen_mullins_photography) is a San Francisco based photographer and book artist. She holds a BA from San Francisco State University, and an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Her work is concerned with incongruous storytelling, ranging from environmentally-concerned urban forest management after natural disasters to the monument removal movement. She has been the recipient of numerous grants including four Minnesota State Arts Board and two McKnight Fellowships. Her work is in the collections of Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Southeast Museum of Photography, and the United States Embassy, Moscow among others. Mullins’ work has been seen in various periodicals, including The New York Times Lens, PDN, The Oxford American Eyes on the South, Black & White Magazine, and Monthly Photo, to name a few. Mullins has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, Penland School of Craft Winter Residency, and In Cahoots Residency. She was recently nominated for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, for her project Expositions are the Timekeepers of Progress, and has been exhibited extensively in the United States. Her work examining gentrification in San Francisco, The Bone of Her Nose, will be shown in a solo exhibition at The Griffin Museum in Boston in November. She is a member of the Rolls & Tubes Collective.
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