Lois Conner American, b. 1952

he All Under Heaven exhibition is a retrospective of the work Lois Conner has created on the Navajo Reservation these past two decades. These important bodies of work began with the stories told by her maternal grandmother, Ruth, who was Cree. Beyond the stories, Ruth shared photographic stereo cards that could be seen through a viewer that made them three-dimensional. This visual storytelling wove tales about the wildness of the landscape, the vast skies, and the freedom to wonder which inspired Conner to explore the American West.

Conner has been traveling the world with her panoramic camera for the past 30 years, yet she has continuously returned to the American West as a place of personal significance and inspiration. Her interest is landscape as culture. Journeys began in 1989 and entailed long drives cross-country in her pick-up truck and sleeping in campsites. This allowed her to wake up imbued in the scenery that would become the photographs. By 1990, she started the first of her projects about the landscape and dwellings of the Navajo Reservation. The portraits that began in 1992, were inspired in part by the work she was making in the Tibet. The color double-exposures render visible the unseen monuments embedded in the land, the Navajo, and their myths and histories.

Photographing with a large-format panoramic camera is very deliberate on her part. Conner switched from the more classical 8x10 format to the 7x17 to include more and expand the narrative cinematically. For the Navajo portraits, the panorama was a way of connecting them visually to the landscape. What she is trying to reveal through photography in a deliberate, yet subtle way, is a sense of time passing, describing her relationship to both the visible and the imagined, to fact and fiction.