Originally from New York City and based in Colorado, Valerie Arcara is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work explores the visual vernacular of human relations to natural and rural landscape, primarily through the lens of land use and built environments. Her work is grounded in place specificity and narrative, utilizing materials found in the field in unison with landscape photography to create immersive installations. For each project she draws heavily from her experience doing field-based research in locations all across the Western United States to carefully interpret how people are shaped by the land and vice versa.
Her new series of photographic work, Transplants, examines matters of physical and demographic change in suburban western environments by looking at the repeated forms and displaced landscapes of new residential housing tracts being constructed. The photographs, all shot on 35mm film, were taken in the outer suburbs of Denver, CO not far from Arcara's home in Boulder. In parallel with and partially in response to creating these images Arcara has created what she calls her Transplant Module, a sculptural installation built on a utility trailer that is both a tool for reflection and intervention. The piece was installed on undeveloped prairie just beyond the new houses seen in Transplants and hints at some of the same forms found in those photographs as well as other elements that reflect Arcara's own personal sense of un-rootedness being from New York originally, but having lived in Colorado for the past seven years. Together these two works invite the viewer to quietly reflect on displacement, assimilation, and physical change in landscape and how it can manifest emotionally in the meaning of place.