The Roswell Museum
proudly presents 

Mary Peck: Land Marks

A Solo Show Featuring Artwork by Mary Peck at the Roswell Museum, Curated by Aaron Wilder



Mary Peck
The Essential Landscape: Junction Highway 741/742, Near Loving, New Mexico, 1983
Silver Print on Paper

July 27, 2024-January 19, 2025 (ended early due to October 2024 Roswell flood)
 

Roswell Museum

Graphics & Paul Horgan Galleries

1011 North Richardson Avenue

Roswell, NM 88201

Mary Peck: Land Marks exhibits the landscapes of Santa Fe-based photographer Mary Peck. Her practice has been “extensively in the open plains of eastern New Mexico and west Texas, seemingly empty, desolate stretches of land,” as noted alongside her work in the collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. From southeastern New Mexico in the late 1970s and mid-1980s to Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico and the ranchlands of Texas in the 1990s to lands along the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline Alberta-Nebraska in 2017-2019, and back again to New Mexico during the Covid-19 pandemic, Peck’s exhibited works represent a limited survey of her 45 years behind the camera. Peck continues to work with film cameras and all the images in this exhibition were made on film. She processed and printed the black and white work in her darkroom. The film from the color images were scanned and printed in a digital studio on an inkjet printer.

Inspired by and dedicated to the land, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago notes that “Peck has traveled to various parts of the world to photograph natural and at times enigmatic landscapes, observing the signs of geological processes, the cycles of weather, and the traces of human activity.” This exhibition is drawn from the work Peck did on five distinct projects. Interspersed with those projects, her work continued in other landscapes, including Florida’s Everglades and the Himalayan country of Bhutan. In the late 1990s she did an extensive project on Washington’s Elwha River before two dams were removed in 2011. In 2022 and 2023, returning to the river, she photographed it running free after dam removal. While an appreciation of landscape is the dominant theme through all her work, there is an explicit interest in the marks humans leave on the land: land use, abuse, and restoration. Human presence may be largely absent in her photographs, but the human impact is always and everywhere felt.  

Mary Peck was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1952 and grew up predominantly in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Peck’s introduction to photography and early days as a photographer were extensively outlined in the essay The Landscape of Home: 1999 by former Port Angeles Fine Arts Center Director Jake Seniuk in the 2019 book Strait Art: An Anthology of Exhibitions from the Upper Left-Hand Corner. He wrote, in part, “She completed her degree in photography at Utah State University [BFA in Photography and Philosophy in 1974], but was first truly inspired in seminars with master photographers, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Garry Winogrand, when she spent six months at the Center of the Eye in Aspen, Colorado, in 1971. There, she glimpsed both technical discipline and aesthetic focus, the mastery over both being indispensable to the making of distinctive photographs.”

Mary Peck moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1974. Rather than pursuing formal graduate study, she instead sought hands-on learning by apprenticing with experienced, well-respected landscape photographers. Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography at the Denver Art Museum, explained in an undated statement, “Peck refined her eye and perfected her technique while assisting the photographers Paul Caponigro [1974-1976] and Laura Gilpin [1977-1979] in Santa Fe… Peck has practiced quietly since that time, immersing herself in long-term projects that grow from her love of nature… and her calm faith in photography’s capacity to bear witness.” While working with Gilpin before her death in 1979, Peck was photographing several small towns and rural areas in eastern New Mexico and western Texas in the late 1970s. She spanned a vast, sparsely populated geographical area from Abbott in northeastern New Mexico, southwest to Lincoln in central New Mexico, and east to Happy just south of Amarillo in the panhandle of West Texas. A small number of Peck’s photographs of these locales are included in Mary Peck: Land Marks.

Mary Peck first got access to a panoramic camera in the early 1980s. In Strait Art, Seniuk elaborated: “An NEA-funded survey project in 1982, through the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, gave her project support, which Peck used to rent a widelux camera and explore with it the Eastern Plains region [of New Mexico].” In 1982, Peck was one of twelve photographers selected to take part in a photographic chronicle of New Mexico. The resulting photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe in 1985, and featured in an accompanying book, The Essential Landscape. In the preface of the book, then Curator of Photography of the Museum of New Mexico, Steve Yates, further described the intent and supportive nature of the project by writing, “the survey provided the working context in which twelve photographers living in New Mexico could rediscover the state and give them the opportunity to create bodies of work that reflect its unique qualities. The project was designed to encourage and sustain each photographer’s individual method of working and to allow ideas to develop over several years.”  

The Essential Landscape, as a book and related exhibition, served as a capstone of the twelve photographers’ years of work. The subjects and styles of the photographers were diverse. Peck’s photographs for this project, and from the work done in the 1970s in this region, seem to anticipate J.B. Jackson’s reflection about the area in one of the book’s essays: “We learned to welcome almost every trace, every sign, no matter how incongruous or unsightly, that reminded us of the human presence: the lonely, two-pump gas station, the gate and cattle-guard entrance to some far-off invisible ranch, the tattered billboard out in the middle of nowhere. We were (and perhaps still are) attracted to ruins, no matter what their size or age. Their shabbiness served to bring something like a time scale to a landscape, which, for all its solemn beauty, failed to register the passage of time.” Each photographer also included a short statement about their work. Peck’s statement read, “Ever since travelers began recording comments on eastern New Mexico and west Texas, most reactions have been unfavorable. The land has none of the things to offer that most people associate with a beautiful or grand landscape. There is no place for the eye to rest, no seeming point of interest. One leaves this area with the feeling that there is nothing there to own. One is left in this land with nothing to experience but the land itself and the glorious unending horizon.”

In the mid-1990s, while residing in the Pacific Northwest, Mary Peck pursued her first solo book project, Chaco Canyon: A Center and Its World (Museum of New Mexico Press, 1994). In addition to Peck’s photographs the book contains three essays. In his essay Thinking About Chaco, Stephen H. Lekson contextualized the history and mystery of the ruins of an Indigenous group by writing, in part, “Chaco lasted two and half centuries, from A.D. 900 to A.D. 1150, and its location was entirely unlikely: a remote, arid, treeless sandstone canyon in the deserts of northwestern New Mexico… Chacoan sites are ‘open’ sites; unlike cliff dwellings, they are exposed to the elements that have reduced almost every other open Pueblo site to low mounds of rubble. Walls of Chacoan buildings still stand as high as five stories tall not because they were built in caves or under overhangs but because of their astonishingly massive building technology, which reflects Chaco’s unique role in the Anasazi world. It was a place unlike any other in the Anasazi region. Chaco was central in space and time.” About this project, Seniuk wrote in Strait Art, “The open desert vistas and the crumbled ruins of a thousand-year-old Anasazi city comprised of acres of massive pueblos five stories high afforded ample opportunities for the layering of forms, the panoramic format being ideally suited to the archaeological themes.”

Another project in the 1990s brought Mary Peck back to the familiar territory of the high plains of eastern New Mexico and western Texas she so thoroughly documented in The Essential Landscape. “In 1997,” Peck writes on her website about her project Spicewood Ranch, “I was commissioned by the owners of a Texas Hill Country ranch to photograph the ranch, which had been heavily grazed by cattle, in its current condition. The ranch had lost many of its plant species to the combined effects of fencing, heavy grazing and browsing by goats, sheep, cows and horse, elimination of burns traditionally set by indigenous peoples, suppression of natural fire, and a large reduction or elimination of key species such as buffalo, wolves and mountain lions. In 1988 the owners began an effort to restore the land to its original live oak savannah ecosystem. To this day the effort continues with regular controlled burns of the grasses to eliminate exotics and increase diversity, extensive removal of invasive species, high fencing to control deer populations, and planting of native wildflowers, grasses and woody species. As other ranches in the Hill Country have shrunk with encroaching development, Spicewood Ranch has expanded, evolving from a traditional cattle operation into a sort of real-world laboratory for research and management of native plant species and habitat.” A number of works from this project are included in the exhibition, and are some of the only images in the show that directly include depictions of humans. However, they are, somewhat unsurprisingly, dwarfed by the immense landscape in these panoramic ranch images.

One of the more recent projects shown is the artist’s 2017-2019 project Spaces in Between. Peck describes it on her website: “For over a decade the Keystone XL Pipeline was planned to run from Hardisty, Alberta, to Steele City, Nebraska. Because the pipeline is a buried, hidden thing, I went to Alberta in May 2017 to see what goes on aboveground—how the land where the oil comes from is treated. I started my trip north of the Hardisty refinery in Fort McMurray, Alberta, the center of the tar sands mining industry, and spent six weeks exploring two provinces and three states, driving several thousand miles to see the landscape the 1,100-mile pipeline would go through. My trip involved looking at water along the way, staying within range—and always downstream—of the proposed pipeline. In October 2019 I returned to Montana to meet landowners whose property the pipeline would cross. Farmers, ranchers, and tribal elders were generous with their time, showing me their land, and describing the impact pipeline construction and the inevitable leaks would have. When the pipeline was originally proposed in 2008 opposition along the route was strong and well organized. The project was withdrawn in 2021. The failure of this project was a great victory for the coalition of ranchers, farmers, tribes and other landowners in Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska who doggedly fought its construction.“

The most recent work in the exhibition, Dwellings, was captured during the Covid-19 pandemic when the job she had restricted out-of-state travel. Repeated trips to the eastern part of New Mexico roughly forty years after The Essential Landscape project, she followed up on an idea, and one photograph, made in 2019 at the end of her work on Spaces In Between. In The Essential Landscape, J.B. Jackson articulated the verbal equivalent of what she was seeing: “Our landscape is everywhere spotted with ruins—ruins of ancient towns, ruins of sheepherders’ shelters built a decade ago. It is as if we had been struck by a neutron bomb eliminating people while leaving their dwellings intact, at the mercy of wind and sun.” In labeling these structures dwellings one could expect people live there, but the dwellers now are a diversity of insects, birds, mammals, and reptiles. Peck has captured these buildings at a time of transition, unforeseen change, and uncertainty. As such, in the photographs of her Dwellings project, Peck has drawn our attention to dwell, in a way, on this preserved moment in time through which we can relate our own experiences of isolation, and lessons of impermanence, during the pandemic.

Mary Peck’s breathtaking photographs have been exhibited extensively across the United States and internationally. In addition to the Roswell Museum, Peck’s work is held in a significant number of collections, including, but not limited to, the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art in Texas, the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art in Florida, the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in Texas, the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago, the Museum of New Mexico, New Mexico State University, Notre Dame University Art Gallery in Indiana, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California. The Roswell Museum’s exhibition Mary Peck: Land Marks is a celebration of many of the artist’s projects over the past 45 years. For more information about the photographer, visit marypeckstudio.com.

Supplementing artworks from the Roswell Museum’s collection, most of the exhibited works are loaned directly from the artist’s studio. A momentous thank you is owed to Mary Peck for collaborating on this exhibition, for sharing so many of her in-depth photographic investigations with the Roswell Museum’s audiences, and for inspiring all of us with her dedicated exploration, documentation, and celebration of the natural world around us as well as her efforts to preserve it for future generations. Thanks is owed to the City of Roswell, the RMAC Foundation, and Jerry Richardson for their financial support and to Agustín Pozo Gálvez for his translation of text about the exhibition to Spanish.

Curated by Aaron Wilder