Traces of Us: Recent Photography | Peter Blum Gallery
By Mouna Saab
January 31, 2025
Traces of Us: Recent Photography will open on February 1st at the Peter Blum Gallery. The exhibition features the works of Farah Al Qasimi, Widline Cadet, John Edmonds, Pao Houa Her, and Guadalupe Rosales as they explore themes of memory, history, culture and geography. Each artist taps into their personal memoir to configure images that broaden the archive, reframe narratives of tangled identity and postulate a hopeful waywardness amidst the complexity of their “inherited pasts.” Traces of Us is indeed the most appropriate name of the exhibit as each artist flashes the viewer with a trail, a haze of their perspective within their shared communities and environments.
From Farah Al Qasimi, one can expect objects in their most sentimental form, from incense to “Wishbones in Lace.” Widline Cadet’s images obscure the present and engenders a dream-like quality by centering subjects in dark but glistening landscapes. John Edmonds will display his imaginative and surreal “White T” series which offers sites of mourning and gathering, in it we see the starkness of red roses held in the hands of black men in solidarity. In Pao Houa Her’s photographs we are mesmerized by a lush of colors from the “poppy field in Minnesota” to "portrait of a woman in a red shirt by a waterfall,” the photographer gracefully blends the spring of the environment to her subjects. Guadalupe Rosales’ frames impresses the quaintness of home with photographs of a spectral backyard and an isolated alleyway overcast by a street lamp; these visages peer into the solemnity that comes from being out late in one’s neighborhood.