re.riddle

Mark Baugh-Sasaki: Transect

September 21 - October 26, 2024

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 21 from 5-7pm

Gallery Hours: Weds - Sat 11am - 5pm
Minnesota Street Project, Room 204
1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco

re.riddle is pleased to present Transect, a solo exhibition of new work by Mark Baugh-Sasaki. The opening reception is on Saturday, September 21 from 5-7pm. The exhibition runs through October 26, 2024.

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Mark Baugh-Sasaki has centered his practice on the ever-shifting dynamics that connect humans and the environment, continually returning to the relationship between how we define “place” and how it defines us. The artist contends that terms such as “nature” and “natural landscape” are inherently problematic and biased, leading him to explore how those terms have influenced and reshaped our understanding of the environment, as well as our role within it. 

Over the past year, Mark Baugh-Sasaki and Mehr Kumar, a researcher in the Oceans Department at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability, have been collaborating on a project related to the endangered whale population of the Southern Ocean (formerly known as the Antarctic Ocean). By investigating the sediment layers of a mud core collected from this region, their research seeks to understand the devastating effects of 20th-century whaling practices on the Southern Ocean’s ecosystem. This collaboration has also raised larger, more philosophical questions: in a world already so dramatically reshaped by humans, what does it mean to restore an ecosystem, how, and to what end? 

Baugh-Sasaki’s recent artistic practice examines geology’s role in signifying our collective — and individual — presence in time and space, our relationship to our environment, and as a vessel for human events and experiences. In his latest body of work, entitled Transect, the artist investigates the latticed influences of geology, photography, and the landscape on his own perceptions of place. Returning to and documenting the same geographic locations over multiple years, his work bears witness to the effects wrought by nature and, increasingly, by human-centered climate change. 

As these once-comforting landscapes shift dramatically into unfamiliar terrain, the artist is challenged to rethink his connection to these places. Are they destroyed forever? Is it possible (or even advisable) to rebuild? What does that look like and to what end? Baugh-Sasaki has become more cognizant that his perceptions of these places have been shaped by what he has learned to see. To maintain his connections to these places, as well as to part of his being, his vision of what these spaces are and should be must evolve alongside their physical permutations.

Transect documents the artist’s personal narrative through landscape-oriented imagery, from foundational experiences in the Sierras Nevada Mountains and along the coast of northern California to the Tulelake Segregation Center, where his father was incarcerated during World War II. His photographic records of place thus become symbols of lived experience, generational identities, and histories deposited not only within these places but also within himself. By deconstructing these images, layering, and recomposing them, he creates his own personal geology, one formed by both place and human experience. In composing and reframing these imagined spaces and objects, he is asking himself, as well as the viewer, to reconsider our ingrained perceptions of what the environment is, could, and should be — a reflection of our changing world and our ever-evolving selves.

Artworks

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