Gabriela García-Luna:
LAND-WATER-PASSAGES
February 6 - May 4, 2025
On a frigid Sunday afternoon in January, I made my way to Gabriela García-Luna’s studio. I was there to conduct an interview for her exhibition at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery. In the midst of a bitter prairie cold snap, it can be difficult to imagine the promise of spring, yet inside, the studio was teeming with vibrant plant imagery and the optimism of new growth.
García-Luna’s latest body of work blends photographic imagery, digital collage and mark making. Her compositions are swirling assemblies of botanical bits: fragments of flowers, fronds and leaves appear in suspended animation against a deep black void. She finishes her work with gold leaf details to beautiful effect, admitting, “I'm thinking about enchantment a little bit.”
Originally trained in graphic arts and design, García-Luna’s primary tool is the camera. She uses photography to observe details in her natural surroundings, a process she likens to notation. However, while photography is the starting point for her latest body of work, García-Luna clarifies that “they're not treated as photographic images. They're not pretending to describe specificities or the way we see.” Her particular concern is “less depiction and more insinuation.”
Compiling a large personal collection of plant photographs, García-Luna’s archive is a register of personal meaning, emotion and memory. She works within modes of representation that approximate the complexity of experience: “I think our reality is that complex where we have different layers of existence, and all are merged and interconnected. The work starts as a photographic memory, so to speak. And the memory, it is a memory of experience. It's not a representation per se, it's more like a notetaking of a moment, an experience that carries emotion for me.”
Although her images contain blossoms and botanicals in pleasing arrangements, these are not still life images, as such. García-Luna’s specimens are fragmented, broken up and reassembled into something more ambiguous. Using an intuitive process of editing, layering and arranging, she incorporates multiple points of view through a variety of camera angles and vantage points. She also plays with distortions of scale and resolution, and her colourful and complex amalgams combine different moments in time and disparate physical locations. It’s a bunch of different things at once, all held together by the organizing logic of the picture plane. “The work responds to certain periods of time where I have been in different places,” she notes. “They carry some specific memories. I know what they are for me, but they become little codes that cannot be deciphered by the viewer. And then they start merging because of my constant moving: being born in one place, living in a different place, travelling for many times to very distant places. And those elements, those geographies are being carried through these images and merged as well. For example, some images are very clearly species from Mexico. Matilde, this is a flower of paradise. So there are species from Mexico and to me, they carry the memory of my family or my ancestry, my female ancestry specifically.”
Regardless of her geographical location, she feels at home in the natural world, “a place where there is a belonging in a larger sense.” She has forged a connection to the lands she walks on, and this deep appreciation has been cultivated through attentive observation and the adoration of her camera lens. “In the natural environment there is a certain quietness,” she explains, “but there's also an amazement of what I see as an intelligence of the order of things, of how things grow.”
Our environments have been under incredible strain. Yet despite the heaviness of the current moment, García-Luna’s art remains uncynical, even earnest, and ever-oriented towards her belief in beauty: “I think beauty is a kind of order, it is a kind of truth. We live in a very convoluted world. And sometimes we open our eyes more to those ugly truths of how the world is. Basically, I think my work is a way of insisting that there is beauty as a manifestation of goodness that exists no matter what.”
According to many prominent thinkers, modernity is a process of disenchantment. The pernicious logics of colonialism and capitalism that propel modernity have stripped the world of mystery and reshaped our relations to nature. As Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor points out, if the devaluation and degradation of the environment is a symptom of disenchantment, perhaps the return to mystery and transcendence may offer a path to healing our fractured relationship to the environment. In their chaotic order, García-Luna’s images recall nature’s ephemeral and fleeting beauty, which calls us to be present and attentive. Her work vibrates with a kind of mysticism of the everyday: “There's always kind of a wonder and the question, ‘what is behind all this order? What is behind all the things that are not visible? The things that are not visual or material themselves, is there a way to transfer them into the work? Is that a way to share, a way to replicate?’ I do believe that. I don’t know. The answers are not all rational. A lot of the answers are vibrational, emotional or in the subtle world. So for me, it's a relationship on one side with the natural world as a manifestation, a manifestation of something that I don't know fully. I have a hint. And the subtle world that I know within me, within myself more than anything else.”
Could the return of metaphysical relics such as truth and beauty in aesthetic discourse refuse neoliberal rationality and "common sense" normativity that frames current political rhetoric? García-Luna seems to think so: “I always think that what we do has an effect. Amazing. The sound we hear in music will vibrate in our bodies and we will feel in certain ways. And that will reflect maybe a response and attitude or the way we could exist. So, in a way, I chose to go in this direction…” Afterall, as Garcia-Luna suggests, “the insistence of beauty is a kind of resistance.”
Troy Gronsdahl