Jennifer Garza-Cuen

Bio: Jennifer Garza-Cuen is an artist from the Pacific Northwest. Currently Assistant Professor of Photography in the Department of Art+Design at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, she received her MFA in photography and MA in the History of Art and Visual Culture with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her BA summa cum laude in comparative literature was completed at the American University in Cairo. Garza-Cuen is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Photography. Additionally, she has received awards and fellowships to attend residencies at The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Light Work, Ucross, Oxbow, Hambidge, Brush Creek, and the Vermont Studio Center. Public collections include Light Work, The Do Good Fund, the New Mexico History Museum and The Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and published in contemporary photographic journals such as Contact Sheet, Musée, Blink, PDN, Der Greif, The Photo Review, and Conveyor as well as on-line journals such as i-D, Feature Shoot, Aint-Bad, Fubiz, iGNANT, Dazed, and Juxtapoz.

Imag[in]ing America

Statement: Our society treats place as a central identifying characteristic, second only to name and followed closely by profession. We all have a catalogue of images in our mind that we call upon when a city, town, or country's name is mentioned and those images help us to form an opinion of place, and those we meet from there. 

What is it that makes us ‘of’ a place? As a former American expatriate and one who has lived my adult life essentially placeless this is a central question in my work. In my ongoing project Imag[in]ing America, I am interested in investigating national, regional, and local identities as well as ideas of otherness as they relate to place and documentary photography in America. 

Photographs have the ability to expand and compress time. They speak of what was, what is, and what will be. We look to photographs to remember and often reenact what we see, pushing old images into the future. Imag[in]ing America depicts a series of locations in the United States as a residue of cultural memory, an inheritance. It is a metaphorical memoir, a narrative re-telling of facts and fictions and a discovery of the dreamland that still is America.

Website: www.garza-cuen.com