Lost Landscapes
March 6 – 29, 2025
Lost Landscapes features recent work by contemporary fine art photographers Debra Achen and Charlotta María Hauksdóttir. The exhibition brings into focus the profound impacts of climate change and the relentless erosion of time on the environment. Experiencing nature has a positive impact on the human body, mind, and soul. It is both a biological and spiritual connection as well as symbiotic, in that human interactions leave impacts and impressions on the environment. So far in the Anthropocene, we have not proven ourselves worthy stewards of our planet. Achen and Hauksdóttir tell this story by hand-manipulating their prints using a variety of techniques. The tension between the beauty of the landscape superimposed with growing environmental threats becomes the basis for a call to action.
Both artists use layering and collage as a means of juxtaposing images in their work. Achen folds, tears, and scorches her photographs, overlaying the lushness and vitality of healthy ecosystems with the devastating aftermath of droughts, burn scars, and atmospheric river events. By stitching together pieces of the collaged images, she presents a metaphor for our role in mending the damage done. With her photo-sculpture series The Cost of Soft she brings to light the environmental impacts of our daily consumption and how our everyday choices make a difference.
Hauksdóttir hand-cuts her multi-layered prints and adds elements of human patterns such as fingerprints, veins, and brain circuits to represent our connection to the environment as well as our impact on it. Her three-dimensional books expand to reveal the complex layers of evolution, growth, and resilience of nature. Other pieces incorporate text about global warming or black fabric to symbolize areas of accelerated land erosion. She also enfolds photographs around branches that she then intertwines to convey a hopeful outcome with proactive human intervention.
The goal of Lost Landscapes is to raise awareness about the crisis of our time and inspire viewers to actively participate in finding solutions. By fostering a sense of urgency and stewardship, Achen and Hauksdóttir aim to engage the audience and empower individuals to contribute to the healing of our planet.
Debra Achen
The hand-folded, burned, and stitched prints in my Folding and Mending series are a way of conveying “the world folding in on itself” from the impacts of climate change. As an avid nature and landscape photographer, it is hard not to internalize what is happening around me. I admit to a growing sense of climate anxiety that is evident in this body of work.
We are so focused on our daily tasks and routines that we are neglecting the environment on which our very survival depends. We have created an imbalance in which our world is collapsing. As record storms, drought, and wildfires wreak havoc on our forests and communities, our ecosystems are unraveling at an alarming rate. My hand-manipulated photographs allude to the results. Coastlines erode and submerge as sea levels rise. Trees and forests, stressed from years of drought, succumb to disease and fire. Golden hills crack and crumble. All at the hand of mankind.
While large, complex solutions are needed to fix the damage, there are small things each of us can do to help slow the erosion, clear the air, mend the cracks, and hold our planet together. The stitching in my images is a metaphor for the mending and rebuilding we must do to make our world whole again. My photo-sculptures speak to how informed decisions about the products we buy and use every day can influence the course of our climate crisis.
Nature is resilient and our impacts can be reversed. Do we have the resolve to make change happen? Some of the Folding and Mending pieces are more deconstructive in nature. Multiple prints are collaged in layers, torn and scorched on the edges. Bits and patches extend beyond the image border, some held in place by threads… as if we dangle at the precipice.
Monterey-based photographer Debra Achen (American, b. 1954, she/her/hers) was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, where she developed a passion for art and a connection to nature. Achen majored in Art Education at Edinboro State University before completing her BA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. She studied a variety of studio arts, including drawing, painting, and printmaking in addition to her training in traditional film and darkroom photography. Her photographs have been included in group exhibitions throughout the US and Europe and in curated exhibitions at the Weston Gallery, the Center for Photographic Art, Upstart Modern, The Photographer’s Eye Gallery and Art Works Downtown, San Rafael. Her Folding and Mending series was selected for Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50 in 2022 and Top 200 in 2024. In addition, Achen is the recipient of the 2024 Center for Photographic Art Landscape Grant. Her images have been featured in numerous publications, including All About Photo, DEK UNU Magazine, and LENSCRATCH. Her award-winning self-published book, Frequency Shift: The Stonehenge Continuum was showcased in the 12th Annual Photobook Show at the Griffin Museum of Photography. Achen’s work can be found in a number of private and corporate collections.
