The sample of work being presented at the New Mexico Tea Company revolves around the theme of “the complete experience,” trying to capture the many activities of an area in one moment in time. Using a variety of formats narratives were built with multiple images as a reference to the storytelling techniques found in art history, namely Egyptian hieroglyphics, Grecian friezes, and stained glass, where a whole event is laid out in one image.

 

Very rarely does an individual see a whole panorama since typically the focus of daily life is individual tasks, ever concentrating on the details directly ahead rather than the whole picture. Consider even now how the location you are in exists not only ahead but also behind you, yet is taken for granted since it’s unseen.

 

Therefore, to show a complete experience one must put together all the individual details, directions, and memories, all of which will overlap but never be seamlessly complete. The truth is in the collection, similar to the view the cubists maintained with collaged works. The prints also express the passage of time and a location’s impermanence. The sum of parts is important to capture a sense of time, especially as individual swatches can be replaced with more current views. The composition can act as a memory of a specific moment of time, or evolve as a layer gets replaced with different weather patterns, quality of light, and population. A print is only as complete as the story it tells, the history of the particular environment, and evidence of passing time, which also means each image could potentially never be “finished” since it can forever be in transition.

 

The application of a sepia tone process in the Abiquiu panorama lends itself to the timeless dustiness of the New Mexican landscape, a more true interpretation of how the scenes appears in person.While at an approachable size in this display, potentially the work will be much larger to emphasize the conglomerate of moments, the discrepancies in the overlap, and the additions made to the scene.