Inman Gallery is pleased to present Linarejos Moreno: On the Geography of Green to coincide with the 2024 Fotofest Biennial, Critical Geography. The exhibition opens Friday, March 8, 2024, with a reception from 6-8 pm and will remain on view through April 27, 2024. The artist will be in conversation with Lana Meador, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art, on Saturday March 16, 2024, at 1pm.
On the Geography of Green is on view concurrently with Katrina Moorhead: (of) Everything Island. This is Moreno's third solo exhibition with the gallery.
In her photographic series, On the Geography, Madrid-based artist Linarejos Moreno explores landscape from a decolonized, gender-informed perspective. Combining photographic and text-based imagery, Moreno’s broader project takes the form of a geographical treatise consisting of large-format works that juxtapose photographs of landscapes with tables of data to capture the physical and social reality of a territory. Utilizing the methods of documentation first used by early colonizers of the American continent –the juxtaposition of images and data– Moreno interrogates the colonial and patriarchal gaze through which the Western history of landscape representation has been constructed.
On the Geography of Green, a subseries of On the Geography, was carried out in abandoned drive-in cinemas in Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana from 2016–2022. The geographic coordinates of the location appear beneath the images of the drive-in theaters. In addition to the photographs, Moreno collected and formatted data about each site to mirror the data distribution used by 19th century German geographer and naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt on his travels to the Americas from 1799 to 1804.
The artist writes:
Through the methodology used by Humboldt, but with the tools and critical distance of the twenty-first century, I want to highlight the importance of including alterity in the production of scientific knowledge. This is one way of giving visibility to the subjects who have been excluded from the transmission of knowledge and therefore of the power it confers, thus positively and actively laying the groundwork for building fairer societies. I am interested in both “human” and “nonhuman” data, and that’s why I also included the analysis of the garden plants.
The left margin displays light data relevant to the photographer’s trade (duration of daylight, solar noon, viability of the shot, etc.) and weather conditions at the time of shooting, which includes the “aspect of blue of the sky and green of the plants, in Pantone scale.” These data points are a contemporary evocation of the Cyanometer, the small wheel of distinct saturations of blue that Von Humboldt used to measure the blue of the sky. Additional datasets include environmental and ecological hazards, socioeconomic risks regarding education and poverty, and the most popular films of the years in which the drive-in theatre was operating, classified in order of popularity.
The right margin catalogs the area’s vegetation and botanical characteristics by county. Some species are visible in the photographs themselves, such as the climbing species that take over the abandoned screens with ease. Notably, the counties often carry names of native tribes (e.g. Ouachita, Quitaque), an acknowledgment of the land’s true stewards who were massacred by European colonizers.
Moreno’s family accompanied her on the trip throughout the Southern United States to execute the project. Other datasets respond to the needs of family care she experienced during these sessions. Amenities like hotel chains, restaurants, supermarkets, and a list of kid-friendly activities to entertain Moreno’s young child introduce a gendered critique to the work. She also incorporates the ongoing history of racial segregation in the American South, listing establishments published in the Green Book, a protective guidebook that identified safer businesses for African Americans to patronize while navigating the Jim Crow South. In publication from 1936–1966, the Green Book would have been in contemporary use as the (now abandoned) drive-in theaters Moreno photographs. As such, the "Green” of the title not only refers to the verdant landscape but alludes to the perspective of "otherness" in the journey, the ways that moving through colonized land and the production of knowledge around said land is inherently shaped by race and gender.
Two works from the artist’s accompanying series, On the Geography of the River, are exhibited in the neighboring viewing room. To learn more about these works, please see the accompanying handout.
Linarejos Moreno holds a BFA from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, an MA in Interactive Digital Technologies from Universidad Complutense de Madrd, and a PhD in Fine Arts from Complutense University-Madrid. Moreno has been an invited Fulbright scholar at Rice University and a visiting professor at the University of Houston The School of Art in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. Her work is collected internationally and has been exhibited institutionally throughout both Spain and the United States, including Alcobendas Centro de Arte (Madrid); the Royal Botanical Gardens (Madrid), the Station Museum (Houston). Moreno lives and works in Madrid, Spain.
