Homestead Acts, The University Gallery, San Diego State University April 28-May 10, 2025
Figure and Ground
2024
Series of digital inkjet photographs. Hahnemühle Photo Pearl fine art paper. Various dimensions.
The works in Figure and Ground bring my family photographs into conversation with the colonial archive to explore the construction of facts and the inherent instability of our narratives of place and belonging. I staged my archival photos at various sites in Minnesota--my white settler family farm and traditional Dakota lands--to explore the multiple histories inscribed in the land. The photos index multiple temporalities and places, producing an interstitial space that destabilizes hierarchies and notions of a singular origin.
Total of Whites, 188
2025
Installation. Archival family photographs, US Census Records. Digital photographic prints on Canon Pro Luster and Chromaline.
The title of Total of Whites, 188 is taken from the text of the 1885 Minnesota State census. In 1885, the immigration of white Europeans was reaching its height in the United States, and in this census year, the Minnesota census takers were instructed to tabulate the number of whites in each township. The census record leaves a trace of the bureaucratic processes involved in the construction of race.
Enacting the Archive
2025
(collaboration with Yadira Gutiérrez Avila)
4K video, 10:48 mins
Enacting the Archive (2025) is a video essay that explores the processes of the colonial archive that produce racial categories while silencing the history of Indigenous people. It combines images of the ancestral lands of the Dakota of the Lower Sioux Indian Community (the Mdewakanton Tribal Reservation) in Redwood County, Minnesota, family photographs, maps, documents and census records, making visible the hands of the artist. An act of dispossession, erased by the archive and the bureaucratic apparatus, gives birth to another world, of white settler colonialism that wants to forget but cannot.
Jill Marie Holslin
Homestead Acts
The University Gallery, San Diego State University, April 28-May 10, 2025
What does it mean to remember things we never knew? What kind of memory are we experiencing when we remember the photograph, but not the “real” event? This is one of the great paradoxes of both photographs and archives. When photographs are preserved in an archive, as a trace, as a memento mori of time, we enjoy the comforting illusion that the past we see in the archive can be known. We can count on this. This is our history.
Yet, there is a politics to this nostalgia of the archive, erasing other histories even as it produces an illusion of a singular, stable past, preserved in the visual image. But history is never over. Archives, like history, are never static. Our acts as artists make the archive a site of struggle in a continual process of making meaning. The work in Homestead Acts uses acts of the body as active, productive agents in the archive to explore these paradoxes of memory, belonging and place.
Jill Marie Holslin, 2025