DESCENT

When she was young, Dawn Roe traveled back and fourth from Michigan’s upper and lower peninsula, and later on, she continued to live “between places” like Portland, Oregon; Chicago, Illinois; and Beloit, Wisconsin. She now splits her time primarily between Asheville, North Carolina, and Winter Park, Florida. “This aspect of transience has very much shaped how I relate to the various lands I occupy and work within and upon—as a guest,” she says. “I very much try to think about what that means.”

Roe carefully considers the role that photography—like painting before it—has played in colonial messaging and mythology. Throughout the 19th century, for example, Manifest Destiny encompassed a belief by white settlers that they were destined—and deserved—to conquer and prosper in the American West. The philosophy was used to justify the removal of Indigenous Americans from their traditional lands, and the approach of seminal landscape photographers like Ansel Adams were steered by its influence.

Using a variety of photographic and moving image techniques, Roe approaches land and water without presuming a “right” to be there or first seeking a kind of permission from the landscape itself. She describes recognizing her “response-abilities” as a white woman from settler ancestry when she approaches different places, maintaining a respect for the environment and specific locations through an ethics of care.

In DESCENT ≈ An Atlas of Relation, pieces of which are seen here, Roe returns to the Great Lakes for a series of analog prints and videos focused on fish populations in the region, which have seen enormous shifts due to intentional introduction by humans, ballast discharge from international cargo ships, or release of live bait, among other causes.

The alewife, first seen in Lake Ontario in 1873, is one such introduction, which managed to bypass Niagara Falls and migrate through canals until its population became so abundant that it exceeded its its own carrying capacity in the lakes. Massive die-offs resulted, strewing beaches with piles of fish several feet high in some cases. Today, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission manages a progressively complex balance of marine life along with often competing sporting and ecological priorities.

“Though the rich histories and fish populations of The Great Lakes are foundational to the project, the work extends from this region to consider bodies of water with comparable cultural and ecological characteristics where relationships to land and water are disputed, revered, mourned, misunderstood, or unacknowledged,” Roe writes in project notes accompanying the series. She connects ideas of time and the lives of fish to descent “as passage, downward movement, decline, sinking, legacy, lineage, origination.”

Find more on the artist’s website, Instagram, and Vimeo.

All images © Dawn Roe