Trent Davis Bailey & Brian Adams: Personal Geographies
Brian Adams, Marie, Rexford, Kaktovik, Alaska, from the series I Am Inuit, 2015. Denver Art Museum: Funds from the Photography Acquisitions Alliance, 2023.68. Image courtesy and © Brian Adams.
Written by Makenna Karas
Photo Edited by Kit Matthews
There is a word in Welsh that conveys the sense of longing that one feels to return to lost places. It’s called Hiraeth–that profound melancholy that pulls us home, back to the first spaces we ever knew, for reasons not easily articulated. It is that soulful connection to places that photographers Trent Davis Bailey and Brian Adams explore in their series “Personal Geographies”, a two-part exhibition on display at the Denver Art Museum through February 2, 2024.
Trent Davis Bailey, Izzi and Cece, Hotchkiss, Colorado, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco © Trent Davis Bailey
Divided into two parts, the series first exhibits works from Bailey’s series The North Fork, which focuses primarily on the Western Colorado farmlands from his childhood and how those memories have stayed with him. The shots are dripping with nostalgia, conveying both the sweetness that accompanies remembering youth, and the relentless ache of knowing that that world is a place you can never return to. This is portrayed beautifully in “Izzi and Cece, Hotchkiss, Colorado” where one child stands visibly in the center, while another one’s shadow soars over her head. The shadow functions as a memory, as something that you can recognize the outline of, but can never hold in your hands. Like a shadow, the memory of who we used to be follows us throughout our lives, soaring over our heads in a display that will disappear with the sun.
Trent Davis Bailey, Karen, Hotchkiss, Colorado, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco © Trent Davis Bailey
From the same series, “Karen, Hotchkiss, Colorado” further investigates that relationship to memory and place by introducing it as maternal. The voyeuristic shot focuses on a woman gazing out at the rural landscape as she rests a hand just above her womb. Bailey invites you to see the profound parallel, where the land we grow up on is akin to a second womb, a safe space of incubation that will always be responsible for the self that we have developed into. Place, and the bond we share with it, is revealed to be much like that of a mother and her child. It aches and pulls at you for all of your life, no matter how far you roam.
Brian Adams, Danny Gordon, Marcus Gallager, John Tikluk and Donald Gordon riding their bikes on a foggy night, Kaktovik, Alaska, from the series Ilatka: The Inuit Word for My Relatives, 2018. Denver Art Museum: Funds from the Bartos Balog Foundation and Frederic H. Douglas by exchange, 2023.30. Image courtesy and © Brian Adams.
The second part of the series contains the works that Adams, as an Anchorage-based Iñupiaq photographer, produced while traversing Alaska. Exposing Arctic communities, traditions, and raw moments of real life, Adams not only interrogates the relationship to place, but the reality of how climate change is mutilating the lands that he has known and loved. Photos such as “Marie Rexford, Kaktovik, Alaska” display Inuit culture with a vibrant grace, using the smile of the woman to communicate the pride and love that the Inuit take in their way of life, the way that global warming is invading. Adams does something similar with a shot of children on their bikes, where much like Bailey in the aforementioned series, he freezes youth in time, inviting you to meditate on the haunting nostalgia of watching new generations of youth run around the place that you once knew, the place that climate change is wrapping its toxic tendrils around.
Brian Adams, Makayla Nayokpuk watching her dad, Dennis Davis, operate his drone, Shishmaref, Alaska, from the series I Am Inuit, 2016. Denver Art Museum: Funds from the Bartos Balog Foundation and Frederic H. Douglas by exchange, 2023.19. Image courtesy and © Brian Adams.
There is a sense of loss latent in both Bailey and Adam’s work that evokes nostalgia for one’s roots while catalyzing an awareness for what global warming is doing to these sacred places.
Brian Adams, Kivalina, Alaska, from the series Disappearing Villages, 2016. Denver Art Museum: Funds from the Bartos Balog Foundation and Frederic H. Douglas by exchange, 2023.19. Image courtesy and © Brian Adams.
