Jill Marie Holslin

Figure and Ground, 2025

Archival inkjet photographs

16 x 20 inches

This series takes up my family photographic archive and brings it into conversation with the colonial archive. The title refers to the figure-ground relationship in art, and the interrelationship between settler and Indigenous and the land in the US colonial context. The "ground" depicted in the photograph consists of native grasses in key sites of conflict on Dakota land in my home state of Minnesota. These sites, commemorated by monuments and state parks, also represent sites of struggle over meaning and mark-making in the land.  When the archival object is returned to its origin, and then restaged on Dakota land, the photos index multiple temporalities and places, producing an interstitial space that destabilizes notions of a singular origin. My visible hand enacts a recodification of history in the moment of photographic capture, suggesting history is an ongoing process, implicating the artist in the struggle over meaning and transmission of history.

 I use the double and as a way to engage with what Nelson Maldonado-Torres has called “the coloniality of being,” the structural interrelationship between self and other, colonizer and colonized, settler and Indigenous, in a colonial context. By layering of materials and the doubling, the photographs thus index multiple temporalities and places, destabilize the notion of a singular origin, a fixed, stable past readily available in the archive.