Marion Belanger

Biography

Marion Belanger photographs the cultural landscape where geology and the built environment intersect. She is the author of Rift/ Fault, (Radius Books, 2016) and Everglades: Outside and Within, (Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2009). Belanger was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. She earned a M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art a B.F.A. from the College of Art & Design at Alfred University. Her work is held in the National Gallery for Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others. Exhibitions include From Here to the Horizons: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez at the Sheldon Art Museum; Photography and America’s National Parks, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Eye on the West: Photography and the Contemporary West, Yale University Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, On the Arctic Edge, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, NY. She was nominated twice for the Prix Pictet Award, and was a 2016 honoree for the Shpilman Photography Prize.  The artist lives in Guilford, Connecticut. 

Lost Lake Project Statement

You should lie down now and remember the forest,

for it is disappearing--

no, the truth is it is gone now

and so what details you can bring back

might have a kind of life.

- from The Forest by Susan Stewart

Lost Lake is a meditation upon fragility and beauty, discovery and disorientation.  The series originated during the pandemic when walking the forest became a refuge from the surreal quality that everyday life had assumed.  This series also reflects the influence of time spent with my young grandchild who is blind. Glimpses of light, and shades of color slip in and out of her perceptual field, but it is the tactile and aural that inform and shape her understanding of the world.  Lost Lake reflects my effort to understand her experiences as she walks the forest with me, and as such I have embraced the use of the photographic glitch, abstraction, and applied color fields. The abstracted patterns are suggestive of scientific recordings (weather, earthquakes, climate records and hearts), or the textures of tree bark and other patterns of nature.  They might also mirror the movement of fingers, touching and exploring (she sees with her hands).  Lost Lake is also a lament.  The forest bears many scars of anthropogenic disruption, especially the fallen trees, so fragile and vulnerable seeming.  There is much to mourn, yet there is also so much to do in this time of precarity.  Reflecting this need for action, I have incorporated photographs of hands and earth at the moment of touch.