Marion Belanger is a photographer who is interested in the concepts of persistence and change, and in the way that boundaries demarcate difference, particularly in regards to the land. She has been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a John Anson Kittredge Award, an American Scandinavian Fellowship, Connecticut Commission on the Arts Fellowships, and has been an artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony, at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, at the Virginia Center for the Arts and at Everglades National Park. The artist earned a MFA from the Yale University School of Art where she was the recipient of both the John Ferguson Weir Award and the Schickle-Collingwood Prize, and a BFA from the College of Art & Design at Alfred University. Her photographs are included in many permanent collections including the Library of Congress, the Corcoran Museum of Art, the Yale University of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography. She was the 2007 Photographer Laureate of Tampa, FL. Her book of photographs Everglades: Outside and Within, with an essay by Susan Orlean, was released by the Center for American Places at Columbia College and the University of Georgia Press in 2009. Her current work investigates the shifting edges of the North Atlantic Continental Plate in Iceland and California. She is on the faculty at Hartford Art School, and resides in Guilford, Connecticut.
Fault
My photographs portray the shifting edges of the North American Continental Plate: the eastern boundary at the Mid-Atlantic Rift in Iceland where it meets the Eurasian Plate, and the western edge at the San Andres Fault in California, where it meets the Pacific Plate. Tectonic Plate boundaries were formed by geologic forces deep in the earth, and as such, there is no regard for political allegiance; they were not determined by wars, by financial interest, or national demarcation. I am interested in the visual traces (or not) of the tectonic plate edges as well as in the artifacts of our built environment upon these edges. My pictures show moments of quiet anticipation in settings that shift between the wild and the contained, the fertile and the barren, the geologic and the human. The images for submission are from Fault, and were made along the San Andreas Fault between 2008-2012.
In California, the Pacific plate is sliding north relative to the North American plate. Consequently, in many millions of years, Los Angeles will be where San Francisco is now. While this transformative plate boundary is characterized by earthquake activity, it lacks the spectacular drama of a divergent boundary such as what is found in Iceland. The landscape is often mundane, striking in its ordinariness. Housing developments built on top of the fault seem to deny the reality of the unstable earth below the surface, a dangerous disconnect.
Along with an exhibition, I intend to publish a book of the project in two volumes, Fault and Rift. James Romm, a classicist, will write an essay about ancient thinking regarding the edges of the world. Simon Winchester, geologist and author, will write an essay that explores contemporary concepts of tectonic edges and continental drift.