Virginia Hanusik - All the Good Earth
A selection of photographs taken from Virginia Hanusik’s All the Good Earth. Her series, which focuses on the fluid, yet engineered landscapes of South Louisiana, is an extension of her wider explorations of the relationship between landscape, culture, and built environment. Hanusik describes New Orleans as “an impossible, yet inevitable city because of its precarious location in the Mississippi River delta.” She continues,
Water – and the need to control it – has been a primary contributor to the development of the city’s geography and regional culture. The construction and maintenance of heavy infrastructure, often hidden, alters the natural landscape of the city and symbolizes the human engineering done to make the impermanent, permanent. Canals, levees, floodwalls, and drainage pipes are physical artifacts that demonstrate our continued attempts to dominate the fertile ground of South Louisiana, putting the stability of its future into question. This project builds on several years of previous work in coastal Louisiana and pairs ethereal images with architectural portraits to emphasize the various ways in which water is experienced. Rather than focusing on scenes of flooding, the photographs are meant to evoke a sense of surrealism that is found every day inside and outside of the flood protection system and highlight the poignant beauty found in an increasingly vulnerable space. As a response to my own need to transcend the reality of 2020, I explore different ways of using color and reflection to examine the themes of connection, loss, and fragility. Due to the impacts of the climate crisis, the region is experiencing heightened pressure to hold back encroaching water as the state continues to lose more land to the sea. Much reportage has been done on Louisiana’s land loss crisis, but the visual narrative is heavily focused on aerial imagery and destruction. With this body of work, I seek to encourage speculation on the future of coastal environments and the limits of human manipulation of a landscape.
