Querencia: Photographs by Casey Sills

QUERENCIA:  Opening Reception Fri.  July 26, 6-9pm

Cash bar at opening

Querencia: Spanish, a metaphysical concept, a place where one draws strength and is restored. In bullfighting, it is the part of the arena the bull seeks and chooses to take his stand, from this position he finds strength and calm.

These photographs are for me, querencias. They are places of meditation, sanctums in whose forms I find a presence that restores and gives peace. I drive backroads, through countryside, towns, and cities, looking to find, see, and photograph those places that are imbued with presence. I make documentary photographs that are both concrete and abstract. In my photographs there is a dialogue between the natural color of the living landscape and the manmade color of structures as they have been modified by conditions and time. My photographs are an aesthetic and topographic archaeology of a site; they are simultaneously a celebration of light gracing form, and a way of seeing which reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary. Photographic accuracy of light and color renders the subtle place where the fortuitous occurs and the marvelous emerges. The photograph captures the chemistry of an instant that both defines, and is redefined by the printed image. A sense of place, an image, a print, a querencia.

Image: Casey Sills