Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
-The search for home place is the mythical search for the axis mundi, for something to hang on to, - wrote Lucy Lippard in The Lure of the Local. For Sarah Christianson, home is a 1,200-acre farm in the Red River Valley of North Dakota. Her parents are the fourth, and last, consecutive generation to work this land, as she and her siblings have all moved away to pursue other careers. The realization that she was part of a larger rural exodus provided her with the impetus to document her farm at this critical juncture. She combined her images with materials from her family's archive to create a rich, multilayered narrative about family tradition, agriculture, emigration and the passage of time. The result is a document that not only tells of hard toil and the declining role of the family farm in our economy, but also celebrates a resilient and fiercely independent tradition.
Synopsis
For Sarah Christianson, home is a 1,200-acre farm in the Red River Valley of North Dakota. Her parents are the fourth, and last, consecutive generation to work this land. She combined her images with materials from her family's archive to create a rich, multilayered narrative about family tradition, agriculture, emigration and the passage of time.
Sarah Christianson (b. 1982) grew up on a four-generation family farm near Cummings, North Dakota. Christianson holds an MFA in photography from the University of Minnesota. Her work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in the collections of several institutions in the Midwest and the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen, Denmark. She has also received grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Center for Cultural Innovation.