From Cindy Waszak Geary:

My ancestors drew me to landscapes they inhabited before and after their immigration from Europe to this continent during the 17^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries. I traveled to and photographed these landscapes in the Netherlands, Germany, and England, on one side of the Atlantic, and on the other, to Virginia, Iowa, New York, and North Carolina. In those places I often felt a quiet knowing inside myself that specific ancestors had been where I was standing, sensing their presence in the present as I felt the hard edges of my linear sense of time dissolve. I aimed to re-create these time-shifting experiences –printing landscape images on fabric to give them the emotional resonances of memory, sometimes merging vintage ancestor portraits in multiple physical layers. Image fragments and unfinished edges suggest the piecemeal and dreamlike quality of memory. I left work uncovered by glass to allow viewers to experience the materiality of the pieces directly. To begin my reckoning with the genocide of Indigenous people who lived on the landscapes my ancestors settled, I name the disappeared Indigenous nations in the descriptions of relevant pieces.

I am grateful for financial support from the Durham Arts Council 2020 Emerging Artist Grant.