Last Light is a collaborative two person exhibition featuring recent and ongoing works by Elizabeth Claire Rose and Anna Rotty. Through their work, Rose and Rotty investigate the natural world through layers of color and light. Their work bears witness to the changing landforms they live within.
Rose’s recent work highlights ecological connections across latitudinal parallels, and compares locations across various countries and continents. Her colorful, manually printed work showcases climatic shifts in specific locations as well as environmental details found within contemporary landscapes. Her work depicts changing light in alpine environments, ice, molten rock, and ash, rare flora, basalt shorelines, and geological layers within landforms. Through layers of vibrant color, repetition, and focus on detail, Rose portrays the way ecosystems persist yet change through time and space.
In her lens based work, Rotty shows water, ice, and land not as a resource, but as portraits of living kin, with memory and knowledge to learn from. While her work appears abstract, the materials she works with, and places represented, are from locations on the brink of imminent change and suffering from extraction; the Rio Grande going dry, unprecedented floods in Roswell, New Mexico, Death Valley, and ice from the Hoosic river in Massachusetts. Closeup, often illegible photographs of water act as cairns that guide us to move and look slowly, witnessing light illuminate, refract, diffuse, and scatter, offering a place to meditate on the elemental aspects of Earth.
In Latitudinal Rose depicts landscape connections across a singular latitudinal parallel. She uses color as a way to indicate temperature shifts, time zones, and as a sign of environmental change. In Hindsight, Rotty shows a dried up Rio Grande in summer overlaying a distant desert scene within. In this piece, both photos are concealed within a Sandia pink privacy screen. This layering reflects ourselves back at us and controls our gaze, demanding that we confront a head-on mirage, or ghost, of water. Last Light asks the viewer to pay attention, to look slowly and closely with play and wonder at the places we live within, to steep in the detailed magic of our world.
