ZIA PALMER: WOMEN OF THE SAME BLOOD

Buchanan Partners Gallery at Hylton Performing Arts Center, Manassas

November 16 , 2021 - January 9, 2022

Exhibition Overview

Zia Palmer: Women of The Same Blood includes a selection of the artist’s photographs from two related series of works, Women of the Same Blood and Las Orillas Del Mundo (The Ends of the Earth). Women of the Same Blood, is comprised of tin-type photographic portraits of fifteen of artist Zia Palmer’s female relatives. Each portrait is accompanied by an interview with the surviving members of this family matriline, or ‘mother line’. The fifteen women included in the exhibit represent four generations descended from the artist’s great grandmother. Together the portraits and interview responses tell an intimate story of one family’s experience with shifting notions of personal identity, belonging, and generational change and it presents a window on the variety of feelings and experiences that distinguish and connect these women of the same blood. The series is also an attempt by the artist to preserve the spirit of her ancestors and hold on to what is being lost throughout the passage of time.

This exhibit also includes landscape photographs from Palmer’s related series, Las Orillas Del Mundo (The Ends of the Earth), in which the artist explores the interconnectedness of land and memory. For the artist, the land records all that took place on it and can become a catalyst in linking the illusive aspects of memory and family history into something tangible. Throughout this series Palmer investigates her personal ties to several ghost towns in New Mexico. By traveling, researching, and sifting through the evaporating homelands of her ancestors she invites the viewer to mediate on their own understandings of such abstract notions as memory, time, and home. For Palmer it is also an attempt to find belonging in places she has never known, but once existed.

About the Artist

Zia Palmer is an artist, photographer, archivist, and family historian based in the D.C. metro area. Through analog photographic processes, Zia records the often slow changes in communities, landscapes, and architecture, specifically legacies and remnants of her ancestral locations in North Eastern New Mexico. Exploring the thought that land has memory, recording all that took place there, has become a catalyst in linking the illusive aspects of memory, identity, and family history into something tangible. She received her BFA from George Mason University in 2019. Zia’s work has been exhibited at the Torpedo Factory Art Center, The Gillespie Gallery of Art, Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, and more.