Rebecca Norris Webb’s The Glass Between Us has always been a favorite series of mine, one I have found myself going to look at again and again. Another more recent project of Norris Webb’s that I continue to come across is My Dakota, an exploration of the landscape she grew up in and an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly.  The photographs in My Dakota provide an intimate and personal view of the West and illustrate what the space and emptiness there feel like.

From the artist’s statement: In 2005, I set out to photograph my home state of South Dakota, a sparsely populated frontier state on the Great Plains with more buffalo, pronghorn, mule deer, and prairie dogs than people; a land of powwows and rodeos, a corn palace and a buffalo roundup; a harsh and beautiful landscape dominated by space and silence and solitude, by brutal wind and extreme weather; a former Wild West territory where European and Lakota peoples clashed, where cultural tensions still linger; a landscape littered with the broken and abandoned; a place I’d learned to love in all its complexity. The next year, however, everything changed. That spring, my brother, Dave, died unexpectedly of heart failure. For months, one of the few things that eased my unsettled heart was the landscape of South Dakota. I found myself wondering whether loss has its own geography.

Visit artist's site: webbnorriswebb.co

Posted November 3rd, 2014