On view from May 20 to June 12, 2022, is a selected sequence of photographs from Phoenix-based artist and educator Buzzy Sullivan’s project, The Silence. Sullivan has been working on The Silence since 2017 and plans to exhibit one sequence of images from the larger project annually over the next three years. This first sequence explores the ability and futility of mapping the experience of desolation. Being a child of the expansive West, Sullivan found the richness of place as a needed balance from generational trauma. These images arc back to the archetype of landscapes Sullivan searched for in his youth.

All photographs on view are printed in an edition of 15 and additionally available as an open edition of mounted 4-inch x 5-inch cabinet cards.

Artist Statement

As a boy, I would ride my Huffy bike as far as my preteen legs would take me from whichever rented apartment or house my family lived in at the moment. I didn’t quite have a destination or really knew why I was riding, but subconsciously I was on the hunt for the fissures. Those live crumbly edges that contrast the order in which we live. I was looking for the threshold where order softly transitions into disorder. 

This project explores formation and ruin, not as opposing forces but rather as stages in the same cyclical process of being. The images in The Silence are intentionally not dependent on specific pin-pointed coordinates. Instead, they create visual metaphors and invite interpretation by creating imprints of land and place without attempting to possess it. 

In my post-Huffy bicycle life, I have found order and disorder are consistently oscillating - alternating currents. We impose and nature rejects. Nature imposes and we reject. A pendulum swings. The possibility exists in the liminal spaces.

But explanations are cheap poetry. These are the pictures I found.

Buzzy Sullivan, 2022