TIA-SIMONE GARDNER

BITTER SWEET EARTHS


5.8.26 - 7.18.26

Opening Friday

5.8.26 6-8pm

ARTIST STATEMENT

What is a dead end? A site of termination, or a point of return? A place where movement stops, or where something else begins to take form?

I grew up on a dead end street. One of many terminated blocks in my town. These outlet-less stress are not planning failures. They are an inelegant and precise method of racial landmarking, a geographic instrument structured by geologic time. A colorline composed of the earth itself, terra-formed because this place was rich with iron ore, coal, and limestone. I’m fascinated with these inelegant place/non-places. A Dead End. How can a place so full of Black life be dead and ended?

The earth has ended many times, for many peoples, and new earths have emerged in our stories of place. The geologic facts that shape this place are not unique, they are connected to other places and temporalities that appear here.

Bitter Sweet Earths brings together a body of work shaped by a familial and unsettled relationship to land, one structured by extraction, erasure, and the ongoing search for life within both.

Photographs can settle time; they hold a place that is dynamic in permanent stasis. In this work, I am interested in the time and speed of landscapes, how images might behave as dynamically and dramatically as the spaces captured here. In this place, I begin with a hard question: What am I looking for? A question that gradually unfolds onto another: What am I living for? Un-dead. Un-ended.

Artist Bio

Tia-Simone Gardner is an artist, educator, and Black feminist learner. Her hybrid practice enacts the Black geographic, long histories—some documented, some not—between black folks and the fabricated environment.

Gardner grew up in Fairfield, Alabama and received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2009 she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania. She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a Studio Fellow and has been an invited artist at a number of national and international artist residencies including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, A Studio in the Woods, and IASPIS Sweden.

She was awarded a number of fellowships including a recent Smithsonian Artist Fellowship in 2020. In 2018, Gardner received a PhD in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota where she completed a practice-based dissertation on Black folks, mobility and the history of small (now tiny) house practices, titled: Sensing Place: HouseScale, Black Geographies, and a Humanly Workable City.

She is a 2023–24 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow and a 2024 NYFA, Anonymous Was a Woman Grantee and she's currently working on a project about Fairfield, her elders, and the geologic time that made her home(town) a profitable racial landscape for the US Steel.

Alongside this work, she continues to teach and develop projects related to rivers, particularly, the Mississippi River, and maritime history through her work on a series of floating camera obscuras, developing a practice of social photography.