©Ariana Gomez, Time Difference, 2023

It is with pleasure that the jurors announce the 2024 Lenscratch Student Prize 2nd Place Winner, Ariana Gomez was selected for her project, My Mother Speaks of Land as Memory, and recently completed the MFA in Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin. The 2nd Place Winner receives a $750 cash prize, a feature on Lenscratch , a mini exhibition on the Curated Fridge, and a a Lenscratch T-shirt and Tote.

Her project, My Mother Speaks of Land As Memory, is an intimate exploration of the entanglement of land, memory, home and familial connections. Gomez  work is both lyrical and cinematic, the weight of all the images in the series build to create a portal into her world. The viewer is invited into this family “memory-scape” filled with longing, questions that can’t be answered, and finally, love.

An interview with the artist follows.

An enormous thank you to our jurors: Aline Smithson, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Lenscratch, Educator and Artist, Daniel George, Submissions Editor of Lenscratch, Educator and Artist, Linda Alterwitz, Art + Science Editor of Lenscratch and Artist, Kellye Eisworth, Managing Editor of Lenscratch, Educator and Artist, Alexa Dilworth, Independent Writer, Editor, Curator, Former Publishing and Awards Director; Senior Editor, CDS Books Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Kris Graves, Director of Kris Graves Projects, photographer and publisher based in New York and London, Elizabeth Cheng Krist, Former Senior Photo Editor with National Geographic magazine and founding member of the Visual Thinking Collective, Hamidah Glasgow, Director of the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO, Yorgos Efthymiadis, Artist and Founder of the Curated Fridge, Samantha Johnston, Executive Director of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Drew Leventhal, Artist and Publisher, winner of the 2022 Lenscratch Student Prize, Allie Tsubota, Artist and Educator, winner of the 2021 Lenscratch Student Prize, Raymond Thompson, Jr., Artist and Educator, winner of the 2020 Lenscratch Student Prize, Guanyu Xu, Artist and Educator, winner of the 2019 Lenscratch Student Prize,  Shawn Bush, Artist, Educator, and Publisher, winner of the 2017 Lenscratch Student Prize.;

©Ariana Gomez, Her Evening Walk, 2023

Ariana Gomez (she/her) is a visual artist based in Austin, TX. She spent twelve years in New York City working commercially and recently returned home to Austin to pursue a graduate degree from the University of Texas. This transition became a catalyst for her most recent work which explores the link between identity, land, home and memory. Working primarily with photography, film, text and sound, Gomez’s practice examines our notions of the ‘home’ as myth through reflections on her parent’s relationship to land. Her interest lies in the intersections of these mediums and how they work together to create an experiential memory-scape of place.

Gomez has exhibited both in the U.S. and internationally most recently showing at the Vermont Center for Photography, sTudio 7 for the Rockaway Artists’ Alliance in Fort Tilden, NY, and for The Print Space Gallery in London, UK. Recent awards include The Hopper Prize Grant, a 2024 University Residency Fellowship from Studios at MASS MoCA, and she was honored to be mentioned as a photographer to watch in Glasstire’s Best of 2022. Her work has appeared online and in publications such as The New York Times, Lux Magazine, PhMuseum, Booooooom, and Ain’t Bad.

Gomez holds a BFA from The Rochester Institute of Technology and is a Diversify Photo Up Next Member.

©Ariana Gomez, Trinity of Searching, 2022

My Mother Speaks of Land as Memory

My mother speaks of plants. To her, we are created with roots that snake down into the deep, dark earth inserting themselves like veins into our hearts, into our souls. For her, this is truly home, a soul home. And hers has never been Texas. You see, she was uprooted. Her soul home is Puerto Rico, the place she only remembers as a small child when everything is towering, and colors are the most vivid. Her roots tore as she boarded a plane at eight years old, never to return. She speaks of unlived lives in the lush watery world where she last thrived.

My father spoke of God. To him, Texas was God’s Country and there could be no other place in the world more important. Texas was his soul home. He died here, having fully rooted himself into the semi-arid soil.

I speak of juxtapositions, and insertion. My mother and father now occupy parallel existences of time while I insert myself into their memories, dredging the hot earth for a glimpse of their life together. I used to spend my time only looking for my father. He was the one I couldn’t grasp onto. He was the one I couldn’t find. However, while searching for my father in the desert landscape, I found my mother attempting to ground herself within this foreign earth. She tries to root herself into the densely packed soil of my father’s landscape, her children’s landscape, her perceived home, yet fails. Through this discovery, I have subconsciously linked the three of us together through place, through time, through memory and continuously search for the spiritual connection of us. I have become an amalgamation of my parents and situate myself within their two landscapes as a bridge. We are three – past, present and future, a triad of faith in the earth, in home, in identity.

©Ariana Gomez, Evening, 2023

I think often of how we perceive, explore and own our identities. How is a perception of ‘self’ created, and what ideology do we tie ourselves to? Who owns this? Who is allowed to knot their identity up so tightly within generations of history to become stronger? And who is made to cut their ties and live with short strands of flimsy cord tied haphazardly to vestiges of place and time? I come back to land. Land creates histories through ownership, through nostalgia, through archival memory. Landscape creates pictures of home, a memory-scape we long for in moments of change and upheaval. And the idea of home is a strong one, embedded in the psyche as something idealistic – a center to long for, or strive towards, or rally behind within cultural, spiritual, and political identities. Often, this becomes an entire identity, taken over by the need to create a space entirely of one’s own. So then, what happens to the self when the idealization of home is connected to a sense of identity and the myth slips, shifts, and comes into question?

Using photography, writing, film, and sound, I work to understand the link between identity, land, home and memory. My interest lies in the intersections of these mediums and how the three work together to create an experiential memory-scape. My current project My Mother Speaks of Land as Memory was born through loss – lost land, lost identity, and the loss of past and future selves for my father, my mother, and myself. Deeply embedded within this grief for unlived lives, I create an installation-based memory-scape of place that becomes more fluid with each viewing. The images change, flow, and adapt to the world around me and within me, while sound and text lap against the watery edge of the subconscious grounding me within a landscape of grief. To the subject of sound, I ask – what does a physical and emotional landscape sound like? My mother and I think about death through the spiritual. My father now lives in the earth and is of the Texas landscape, so what might death sound like when coming directly from this land? I ask the viewer to meditate on one of the few personifications of my father as he ebbs and flows from the room, as subconscious memory and a grounding of emotion.

Through all of this, I am reminded of the history of Aztlan – the mythical homeland of the Aztecs, and the place revolutionary Chicanx culture rallied behind. All for a place to call home, all for a history that was taken from them, first by the Spanish and then by a steady succession of any/all colonizers. I’m intrigued by the memory of a created diaspora, shared by many across time and generations. Land, as we return to, creates histories. And histories create a sense of place and belonging. As a child descended from the mother who was torn from her land, and a father who lost any connection to this Aztec place of spirituality and wholeness, I am desperate to find a home that we can share, between worlds, between landscapes, between time. For it was only upon returning to Texas, the place of my birth, that I realized home is an idealization and amalgamation of every single memory and experience we choose to cling to. Home exists as a myth world; as powerful, repeated, collective affirmation. Through the combining of images, text, films, and sound, my work perceives home as existing in the space between reality and abstraction.

My practice seeks to engage in dialogue about who creates history, who owns history, who creates and owns their identities, and who must create shared diasporic experiences simply to survive in the world. My mother, my father and I span three separate existences across time that coalesce in the shared memory of reconciliation and understanding. To the viewer, I offer my experience of grief through generational migration and distorted memory, which has become crucial to connecting with other communities. My artistic practice is flourishing not only for myself, but for my community and all those who understand and mourn the generational ties to a land, now long forgotten. I intend to pull from long histories to fight for my own experience of place, my mother’s threatened landscape, and my father’s forgotten sense of identity, tied to a homeland now known only as myth.

©Ariana Gomez, What Used to Be, 2022

Raymond Thompson, Jr: The title of your project, “MY MOTHER SPEAKS OF LAND AS MEMORY. ALWAYS NOSTALGIC, AND NEVER IN PRESENT TENSE,” is striking. Can you unpack the title for us? How did you come to this work?

Ariana Gomez: First, I wanted to say thank you to you Raymond, and Lenscratch for the opportunity to speak about my work. It really is an honor to be chosen as the second-place recipient of the Student Prize.

I feel like I came to this work through the tendrils of many different thoughts. My father passed away in 2011 and I remember at the time asking myself what kind of photographer I was, that I had taken no photos of him. All I had was a family archive, images that my mother mostly had taken when we were younger. I began trying to understand him and what it meant that I had never pointed my camera in his direction. In 2019, I decided I wanted to create a portrait of who I thought he was, but of course the question that nagged me was: How do you create a person-less portrait? This is the question that pushes the work to this day. I began to think of landscape as a means of creating a portrait – a way to personify him within the boundary of Texas, our shared home. I created a 1/1 artist book called The Blue of Distance (shoutout to Rebecca Solnit) to encompass that work for that moment in time.

When I first applied to graduate school I was thinking a lot more broadly, about Chicanx culture, Aztlan and the idea of a home that may or may not exist as tangible land. I had just moved back to Austin after many years away and found myself a stranger in my own home and I was thinking about Salman Rushdie’s essay Imaginary Homelands. In it, he discusses finally seeing his childhood home in the real, vs years of seeing it only through black and white images. The colors of real life were violent and almost too intense for his memory of the place. I was intrigued by the unreliability of memory, especially when its tied so deeply to a home and a person’s identity. This brought me back to the Blue of Distance, and how closely land becomes an identity – a personification of us. I turned to my mother. We both lost someone in my father, and I never really focused on her unmooring of home when he died. Being from Puerto Rico,
she never felt at home in Texas. She still tells me; her roots never took to the arid earth because hers exist in Morovis, and the mountains of her own home. Over the course of my grad program, I’ve felt like I’ve been untangling threads and knotting together chords of my own history. I was very focused on my
father, but seeing my mother lose herself in a foreign earth, I realized I needed to extract him as the main character from the story. That’s when the title came about. I was in Sydney looking at this sculpture piece called Randomly Now and Then by Joan Brassil that wires cores of rock from the earth with a way to
listen to its sound. It’s as if the earth is singing. With the realization that earth and land have a sound, I jotted down those words – My mother speaks of land as memory. Always nostalgic and never in present tense – more as a poem for later if I’m honest. But as I was putting the project together, I realized it encompassed everything for me – the way we talk about our home always with nostalgia, never in the here and now. It becomes something like a myth we have to untangle our identities from.

©Ariana Gomez, You, Before, 2022

When I look at your work, I see images tip-toeing on the bounds between personal documentary and fine art. How do you situate your work in contemporary artistic practice?

In 2021, ICP had an exhibition titled But Still, It Turns guest curated by Paul Graham that I still obsessively think about. In this exhibition, the term ‘post-documentary’ is used to emphasize that there is no narrative or story – a return to the freedom of imagery within and of the world, rather than created or
staged imagery. Maybe this is presumptuous to say, but I have always aligned my way of photographing with the artists who were featured. So, it really felt like, for the first time, my photos had a place in contemporary art. I had also never heard the term ‘post-documentary’ before and was intrigued by what it
could mean and offer in the world. It felt like a call-back to traditional documentary images but more personal, more intimate, and a slower pace in the act of photographing but also the act of viewing. And that’s exciting for me. I enjoy the freedom from narrative I’ve cultivated with this body of work and could
easily see it situated within a ‘post-documentary’ world. My work is about memory, landscape, unlived lives, and the archives that create our identities. There is no set path for memory or the parallel lives we could have taken if this or that was different. I speak often about the perceived memory of a landscape vs
the real tangible land right in front of us, and of distorted memory and unreliable narration. Post-documentary allows me the room to explore, sift, and slip through the contemporary art world and skirt the line between documentary and fine art.

©Ariana Gomez, Untitled Self Portrait, 2022

Your work’s landscapes move in a way that pays homage to traditional images of the North American West. But there is also an element of magical realism, such as a solitary neon cross emerging from a desert landscape or a deer crossing through a desert town in daylight. What role do landscape functions in your work, and how do they connect to your family’s memory?

With this work, landscape acts as a bridge between my mother, father and myself. I’m looking for my family through landscape always. And land spans place, time, and distance all at once. Both of my parents have always had ties to their respective landscapes in different ways. My dad thought Texas was the greatest place in the world, but never tied this to his own heritage. His identity was somewhat skewed in this way, never really acknowledging his Mexican roots, but just so vehemently Texan. For my mother it was the opposite. I think because she was torn from Puerto Rico at such a young age, she ties herself to that landscape and is so vehemently Puerto Rican. As a product of both landscapes, I remember trying to figure out where I should situate myself. Exploring their land has given me the opportunity to connect to them through place and most importantly through time. Because my father passed away, the exploration
of his landscape ties me to him through time and memory. With my mother, I can be present with her, but she speaks of her land in the past tense. So, I’m always looking backward, even with my feet planted firmly in the present, touching the earth that I myself call home.

It’s interesting you use the term magical realism as well. I fully identify with that way of looking. I’m always trying to find the spiritual embedded within a landscape and more often than not, it shows up as animals, as signs, as spiritual iconography. I’m drawn to images that distort the land only slightly to have the viewer ask themselves if what they are seeing is real or not. And I love our imprints on the land that are barely visible. I love thinking about the person just before me who left a piece of themselves on the land that I am now interacting with. It’s another way of interacting through time and space.

©Ariana Gomez, Mom at Sun(rise)set, 2023

What is the unique importance of installation to your artistic practice? Is there a distinctive connection between installation and memory in your work? If so, how does this unfold?

Installation opened an entire world for me in furthering my artistic practice. I come from a pretty traditional photographic background where everything is matted, framed, and installed in a more obviously narrative structure. But as I mentioned before, I started grad school with the intention of breaking away from this. I was so used to seeing this in a lot of photographic exhibitions and within photo history. Installation became my starting point into the imagery. I want the viewer to enter my room in the gallery and feel transported to a liminal space, between night and day where their memories of grief and family and
nostalgic contemplation could mix and mingle with my own, and we could consider all the feelings of loss together. It probably sounds very sentimental, but I wanted this feeling of walking down the street at dusk or twilight. There’s a sadness when the day ends and that feeling is so hard to capture with a singular
image, or in a story-telling kind of way. Installation helps guide the viewer into this world and then from there I could share the specificity of my own family with the intermingling of their own memories. I should probably also mention there is a sound and video component to all of this. The 15min audio piece titled
You, As Sound Memory plays on loop throughout the room and is meant to be a contemplation on the sound of a landscape, of my father embedded within this earth, and a meditation on grief as the viewer sifts through my memories on the wall. The two videos sit across the room from each other and play on
loop, speaking to one another through time. One of the videos was made by me this year, the other is an 8mm film projection from my mother’s archive made by her of my father when they were young. The addition of these three elements into an installation help to guide the viewer between the past and present in a way just still images have a more difficult time accomplishing.

©Ariana Gomez, The Causeway, 2023

I see different portrait-making strategies in this project, from straight portraits where the subject’s gaze directly meets the viewer to images that focus on the sitter as they look away or are obscured in some way and self-portraits. Can you tell us about these choices?

Portraiture was a hard one to discern for me. While the work is very personal to my family and our rooted identities, I have always thought about a wider diaspora of Chicanx and Latinx culture. It created such a battle in my head about whether or not to include strangers in the project. Ultimately, I did within the landscape of imagery, but most of the time, they are obscured or hidden, except for those people who I felt could become a stand-in for my father or mother (like the boy on the horse). I want them looking directly at us, the viewer, so we intentionally slow down. Even if it’s just a photo of a person, we stop and look at who is looking back at us. It’s powerful to slow down in these moments and consider who this person is/was/supposed to be. Conversely, people looking away became a conduit for spirituality, or the obscuration of memory. Within the context of the installation, I wanted gazes to connect to one another,
seeing each other or looking past one another into the unknown. My mother is the only one who does all of it at once. She is great to photograph. The minute I ask her to stop and hold a pose I caught her doing, she falls right into this intensity that I’ve even tried to emulate. It’s sort of this other character almost –
maybe a defense mechanism even with her own family. A need to be strong because that’s what she’s been her entire life. And I really enjoy juxtaposing that with something like the image of her looking down the street or contemplating in the early morning sun. There’s more vulnerability than I’m used to. And like
I said, I tried to emulate it, so there is one self-portrait in the mix that I tried, and honestly, I hated it but knew I needed to insert myself a little more forcefully into this world. Actually, most of the imagery of me is old family photos from when I was younger that my mom took of me. Again, I like that back and forth of
past and present and switching of time. What’s really lovely is when someone sees a younger version of my mom and assumes it’s me. I sometimes don’t want to correct them.

©Ariana Gomez, Desert Stop, 2022

©Ariana Gomez, Shae at the River, 2022

©Ariana Gomez, What? 2023

©Ariana Gomez, I Knew I Heard Coyotes, 2023

©Ariana Gomez, Come Back, It’s Dangerous, 2022

©Ariana Gomez, Installation View from My Mother Speaks of Land as Memory, 2024