I Dreamt We Spoke Again

Shaena Neal

Artist Statement:  When suffering loss, people experience phases of grief before reaching a point of acceptance. How do we orient ourselves to cope with living through a drawn-out process of displacement? The series featured in this exhibition, I Dreamt We Spoke Again, struggles with ongoing loss through the staging of plant portraits. These photographs pose grief, desire, and their impacts on our place within landscapes to grapple with ecological uncertainty. The human form interacts with these dying flowers in response to their inevitable decline. An improvisational performance opens an avenue to reflect with the ephemeral plant subject. The peripheral human presence and portrayed plant life mutually reveal and obscure each other, blurring the boundaries between the self and the shifting landscape. 

While I Dreamt We Spoke Again confronts anxieties of prolonged losing, When I Awoke is a recollection of what is lost. This series of silver gelatin photographs capture living blooms in their natural habitat, under sunlight. Using black-and-white 35mm film, these portraits freeze a moment into memory – a memory incomplete and romanticized. What remains are fleeting fragments to embrace.

About the Artist:  Shaena Neal is an artist primarily working with photography. She variably uses digital and analog photographic processes to grasp notions of environmental entanglement. Her practice is focused on our connection to landscape and (dis)placement through memory, desire, and identity. Shaena has a BFA from the University of Kentucky and continues to volunteer in the photography lab. She owns and operates an art gallery in Georgetown, Kentucky, Touching Ground Gallery, which represents 10+ Kentucky artists and artisans. Currently residing on a quiet farm in the outskirts of Paris, Ky, meditation and interaction with the land give light to her work.