Excerpt from curator and writer Christopher Lynn’s exhibition review:
“Two photographic works by Tiana Birrell bear the same image of a cairn (stacked rocks used to navigate backcountry hiking trails). However, these cairns don’t seem to be made of pristine stones. They are covered in chalky, brightly colored paint, as if they were part of a construction site or urban survey marking. Two pieces of visible blue tape hold the precarious stack together within a generic, neutral built environment. The mildly altered photographs presenting the cairns are screenshots of the artists’ computer desktop, complete with familiar blue folders stacked in grids around the preview window of the cairn photo. The photos bear the same base title: solastalgia: 40.6.99470,-110.961828. Solastalgia is a neologism for environmentally induced stress stemming from a feeling of impotence in the face of changing environs. The longitude and latitude point to Wall Lake in the Unita-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. These works seem to clearly point to Robert Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacement (1969), where the artist planted small mirrors in landscape. These mirrors transported once view, through reflection, into another landscape which was then captured through photography and exhibited somewhere else. The constant disorientation in Birrell’s photographs— a digital image on a desktop is screen captured to new altered images, which are printed and physically separated within the gallery space, then titled to point to another physical location—subvert the authority of cairns as trusted way finding markers. The work then becomes not about place, but a series of factorial removes.”