Wendy Phillips: La Costa Chica | La Sombra

This exhibition brings together two bodies of work by Atlanta-based photographer, Wendy Phillips: La Sombra, and La Costa Chica. Visual artist, psychologist, and ethnographic researcher, Wendy focuses on the lives of women of African descent in Latin America in a process that begins with oral interviews which in turn inspire conceptually-driven photographic work.

Wendy writes that “La Sombra refers to the traditional Afromestizo belief that illnesses and instances of spiritual disharmony and disequilibrium occur when an aspect of an individual called La Sombra, also known as the soul, or shadow, becomes lost or endangered. It must be ‘caught’ or ‘called back’ to its owner so that equilibrium may be restored and healing be made possible.” In this body of work—which can be seen through an individual or collective lens—Wendy imagined objects that symbolize La Sombra, drawing as well on personal reflections about archetypes of the feminine. Printed on fiber paper and toned with selenium, the process for creating La Sombra involves a material and metaphoric alchemy.

The images in La Costa Chica were made in the town of Juchitán, along “La Costa Chica” in the state of Guerrero, México. Juchitán is an Afromestizo community of people of African and North American indigenous descent. In this project Wendy is working in a more traditionally documentary manner, using both oral interviews and photography to explore daily life, rituals and celebrations, but complicates the document by using a Holga camera. An inexpensive medium format camera with a plastic meniscus lens, the artist’s medium gives the resulting images an unpredictable, dreamlike, and surreal quality, bridging past and future, the real and the imagined.

Wendy’s quietly performative photographic process is a connective thread, inextricably linking her ethnographic research to the creation of personal rituals through which the artist comes to know herself more fully. In a cultural and political context in which her forebears were denied the right to practice their traditions, the artist draws on both resistance and recovery, motivated by pride in ancestral wisdom. Informed by challenges, traumas, and triumphs, both past and present, Wendy uses her creative practice and deep knowledge of multiple traditions to imagine and nourish connections between peoples and cultures that build resilience in our time.

Wendy Phillips has studied photography at the International Center for Photography, Maine Photography Workshops, The Penland School of Crafts, and the Manuel Alvarez Bravo Center for Photography in Oaxaca, Mexico. She is drawn to the alchemy of the darkroom, and her favorite medium is silver gelatin printing on fiber. She has recently begun studying some of more arcane photographic processes including wet plate collodion and ambrotypes.

Wendy, also a trained psychologist who incorporates art in her therapeutic and community-based work, will be visiting CIIS in late September 2018, speaking about her creative work, and leading a weekend-long workshop through the Expressive Arts Therapy Department.

Deirdre Visser, Curator