Fall Lecture Series: Kija Lucas & Rachel Phillips @ PhotoAlliance
PhotoAlliance is proud to present a compelling lecture featuring artists Kija Lucas and Rachel Phillips. Both artists find wonder in the natural world persisting around us, using frameworks of ecology to understand our history and consider the future. Each observes, gathers and photographs often unassuming specimens and objects, building personalized image archives. In a region defined not just by natural beauty but technological innovation, both artists embrace the mechanical nature of photography, often utilizing the scanner as their camera of choice. The artists will present an overview of their work and insights into their processes, as well as field questions from the audience at the end.
Kija Lucas is an artist and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her expanded photographic practice uses the languages of scientific imagery, maximalist installation, and the community-driven archive as an exploration of memory, home, and belonging. She is interested in how ideas are passed down and seemingly inconsequential moments create changes that last generations.
Lucas’ father was a gardener, and his devotion to the plant world cultivated her interest in exploring her roots through the lens of the natural world. She highlights not only indigenous and introduced (non-indigenous) botanical specimens, but also the tools used for plant propagation. Captured through photographic scans, her specimens are found at sites essential to her personal history throughout the Bay Area.
Lucas grounds her work in direct opposition to 18th-century botanist Carl Linnaeus’ system of taxonomy. In Systema Naturae (1735), Linnaeus established a rank-based classification of organisms that still serves as a foundation for biological understanding and that ultimately served as the model for the construction of scientific categories of race and sexuality. Questioning how we choose what is considered “natural,” “beautiful,” and “useful,” Lucas treats the cultivated plants, weeds, native, and non-native species she gathers equally, challenging the scientific framework society has inherited from Linnaeus.
Her work has been exhibited at The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Mills College Art Museum, Palo Alto Art Center, For-Site's GuardHouse Program in San Francisco, SF Camerawork, Montalvo Arts Center, San Francisco Camerawork, The International Center for Photography, and Black Cube Nomadic Museum Headquarters, amongst others. Lucas is an Artist Fellow at Montalvo Center for the Arts, and has been an artist in Residence at Recology San Francisco, and the DeYoung Museum. Lucas received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from Mills College two of the many beloved institutions that have fallen victim to whatever fuckery is going on with academia and the economy.
Rachel Phillips began photography while completing her undergraduate degree at Skidmore College, graduating in 2005. In numerous group and solo exhibitions she has presented a series of projects exploring the photograph as object, often resulting in unique works incorporating a specialized transfer printing technique as well as other processes like encaustic wax and materials ranging from old envelopes to 19th century cabinet cards. A frequent theme in her work is a desire to “reanimate” the vernacular photographs and paper ephemera in her collection by reworking them in a variety of ways to create imagery that is resonant with the past, yet has a new vitality and reflection of our own time and perspective.
Her most recent show with artist Lucien Liu, Natural Order, opened in October at the Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, CA. Natural Order centers on a shared motif of spiders and spiderwebs that weave literally and metaphorically through both artists’ work. Webs offer up complex metaphors: while arrestingly beautiful, their evolutionary purpose is nevertheless entrapment. Natural Order maps this tension through our natural and unnatural Northern California coastal environs.
In her new series Not a Cloud in the Sky, Rachel culls digital images of clouds suspended above the windowless data centers powering today’s cloud computing and artificial intelligence fever dreams. These sky pictures serve as the basis for monoprints made outdoors directly from spiderwebs in a “pinch me, I’m real” reminder that the natural world undergirds even our most seemingly immaterial technologies.
Making artists’ books forms a cornerstone of Rachel’s work alongside printmaking, and this past summer a new book Lovelace about the origins of AI technology in 19th century weaving was published by San Francisco Center for the Book. Locally, Rachel is represented by Chung24 Gallery in San Francisco.