Exhibitions

CHRISTINE ROGERS: NEITHER HERE NOR THERE

Gallery 121 (Belmont University) / 1900 Belmont Blvd., Belmont University October 3, 2016 - October 21, 2016

Christine Rogers

I have been photographing in the mountains of India for the last four years. I started photographing the various mountain landscapes that claim and self promote to tourists as “The Switzerland of India”. Because of the rise of the Indian middle class, explosion of the domestic tourist industry, and the lore and lure of Bollywood filmmaking’s connection to the Swiss landscape, the northern hill stations of India have been re-imagined as a surrogate landscape first for contested regions of Northern India and now for Switzerland. These multiple Switzerlands, along with the cultural confluence of India and Switzerland, is creating a fascinating pictorial and conceptual space and in its place, an imitation of an imitation has been constructed. Within this exhibition I am showing archival images (from film stills and found negatives) along with my own images. I am interested in visual amnesia and remembrance as a way to describe a loss and recreation of the idea of a landscape as well as the idea of a photograph. What results is an exhibition of multiplicity: in voices, eras, points of view, cameras, formats, and moments looking at the same places to re-imagine not so much a specific landscape but rather the idea of a landscape through fragmented multiple places. 

-Christine Rogers, 2016