Atascosa Borderlads
Gallery Talk and Reception
Luke Swenson and
Jack Dash
Thursday, October 12, 2023 | 2:00 pm | Brazos Hall
Atascosa Borderlands
Gallery Talk and Reception
Join photographer Luke Swenson and naturalist Jack Dash for an informal gallery talk, artist Q&A, and reception to celebrate the opening of their exhibition, Atascosa Borderlands. Jack and Luke will share some of the stories behind their photographs, personal experiences from the Arizona-Sonora border, and insight from the process of creating this work. Guiding us through this immersive installation which combines original film photographs, oral history interviews, botanical specimens, historical images, found objects, and living plants.
Atascosa Borderlands is a transdisciplinary storytelling project by photographer Luke Swenson and naturalist Jack Dash. The project developed out of a comprehensive botanical flora of a 203,799 acre section of the Coronado National Forest in southern Arizona known as the Atascosa Highlands.
Since 2017, the project has worked with over 80 community members bridging social and political divides: ecologists, environmental conservationists, cattle ranchers, humanitarian aid workers, migrants, deer hunters, ex-border patrol agents, and indigenous community members. Atascosa Borderlands seeks to move beyond the politicized approaches found in mass media to showcase the profound, and often contradictory experiences of the Borderlands, bringing to the fore the voices of a broad spectrum of residents who can speak directly to the challenges these communities are facing.
This project brings together hundreds of original film photographs, oral history interviews, botanical specimens, historical images, and found objects in the form of an interactive website; creating a living archive dedicated to this remote 42-mile section of the US-Mexico border.
Luke Swenson (Born 1992 in Washington State, USA) is a photographer and storyteller based in Tucson, Arizona. He is a graduate of Pratt Institute’s BFA Photography program, and a Director’s Fellow with the International Center of Photography in New York.
Jack Dash (Born 1992 in Washington State, USA) is a naturalist and writer based in Tucson, Arizona. He is President of the Tucson chapter of the Arizona Native Plant Society and is a horticulturist with the botany department at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.