Everything She Touches Changes - Gretchen LeMaistre
Everything She Touches Changes
Gretchen LeMaistre
Hurricane Helene blindsided the communities of Western North Carolina, abruptly imploding our senses of scale and destruction. We are still mourning with those who have lost loved ones, homes, and livelihoods.
I did not lose my family or home, but I’ve had an overwhelming visceral response to the carnage entangled in the banks of the Swannanoa River- less than a mile from my home. Workers continue to reshape the landscape every day, managing heavy industrial equipment to shuffle, clear and pile the aftermath. Where is it all going? What are the environmental implications?
I return to the same sites again and again, sometimes rephotographing them in a counter intuitive effort to cope with unknown consequences- almost like licking a mouth sore. The photographs are failures in the sense that they do not come anywhere near what it feels like to be walking and witnessing the land- as a human body. I struggle with this disconnect, and with the disconnect between images of ruin and the individuals who’ve been impacted. I am in the process of inviting people connected with these sites to share their reflections and experience by writing on prints. As a way of alluding to individual memory and collective history, images alternate between black and white and color. While the photographs convey only a fraction of experience, perhaps they can function as tokens for conversation, connection and witness with one another and with the world at large.
Gretchen LeMaistre is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Jacksonville Florida. Her work explores complex entanglements of place-making, perception, and the American landscape. She has exhibited internationally at Datz Museum in South Korea, Schilt Gallery in Amsterdam, SFO Museum, San Francisco, the SFMoma Artist’s Gallery, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Davis where she was awarded the Magrit Mondavi Fellowship and the Fay Nelson Grant. Her work, Live Burls, published as a book in 2016, has been featured in Time magazine, Hyperallergic, and Lenscratch. and collected by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. She is currently based in Asheville, North Carolina.
Instagram: @GretchenLeMaistre
