$35.00 U.S. ((Short discount; trade discounts available for bulk sales)
E-book TBD.
Hardcover with PLC
96 pages with 46 duotones by the author, 1 historic photo, 1 Google Earth photo, and 1 map/plan = 49
8.0″ x 8.875″ upright/portrait
ISBN: 978-1-938086-87-8
Published in February 2022
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
Published in association with the
Minnesota State Arts Board and the Center for the Study of Place.
Events and Exhibitions
October 1 – 29, 2021
Exhibition Landfill: Elegy for the Santa Maria Valley
Effie R. Conkling Gallery at Minnesota State University, Mankato
October 6, 2021 at 7pm
Artist Talk in the Ostrander Auditorium with a reception to follow in the Conkling Gallery at 8pm
October 7, 2022
Presentation at MWSPE Conference ‘Currents’
Cincinnati, Ohio
November 17-20, 2022
Portfolio Reviews, Review Santa Fe
Santa Fe, NM
December 3, 2022
Book Event, Rosalux Gallery.
Minneapolis, MN
March 16-18, 2023
Book Signing, SPE National Conference ‘Homecoming’.
Denver, CO
by Brett Kallusky
with and afterword by Matthew Coolidge
A visual discovery of a land not thought of in a historic California place!
Landfill is a collection of eye-opening photographs made by Brett Kallusky in Central California’s historic Santa Maria Valley, once the homeland of the Chumash people. This work directs our attention not to the world-renowned vineyards on the hillsides, a legacy of Spanish times, but to the vast agricultural production of row crops on the valley floor and to the millions of tons of plastic and agricultural waste that make their way to the regional landfill.
Kallusky’s photographs reveal scenes that are literally hidden from view and public knowledge, underscoring their nature as documentary evidence of what is involved when crops are grown at a massive scale. Despite the cool formalism and emotionally detached style of Kallusky’s pictures, he engages us to consider how our way of life impacts our relationship with and understanding of the land, if only by eating the Valley-grown broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, celery, lettuce, squash, and strawberries that are transported to grocery stores throughout the nation.
Given the Valley’s location near the oil-rich Pacific waters outside Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties, which comprise the Valley, have had their fair share of calamitous environmental events and contaminated locations associated with oil. These include, most recently, the superfund site in Casmalia, where 4.5 billion pounds of petroleum-based and other hazardous waste were transported to a disposal facility there from 1973 until its closing in 1989, and the massive out-of-control Union Oil Tank Fires at Avila Beach in 1908 and San Luis Obispo in 1926, where three workers were killed. Kallusky renders these places anew.
Addressing the current, human-centered epoch known as the Anthropocene, the quiet but powerful images in Kallusky’s Landfill bring the Valley’s invisible spaces into full view, showing how industrial agriculture both supports the nation’s food needs and fuels a cyclical engine of consumption, waste, and renewal. The Santa Maria landscape reveals who we are and thus serves as a microcosm of America with ramifications far beyond the Valley’s geographical boundaries. What is left in the wake of that system to which we all belong? In Landfill, the landscapes we create tell it all.
Read an interview with Kallusky on Lenscratch
About
About the Author
Brett Kallusky was born in 1975 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and grew up in Afton, Minnesota. He completed his B.F.A. in photography at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and his M.F.A. in photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Since 2007, he has taught photography full-time while maintaining an active photographic studio practice. He is currently an associate professor of art at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. His photographs have appeared in Aint-Bad Magazine and National Geographic Online, and his previous book is Journey with Views/Viaggio con Vista (self-published, 2014). Kallusky has been a Fulbright Fellow to Italy, received three Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants and numerous Faculty Professional Development Grants from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, and is a two-time finalist for the McKnight Fellowship for Photography and Visual Arts. He resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
About the Essayist
Matthew Coolidge was born in 1966 in Montreal, Canada, and completed his B.F.A in geography at Boston University in 1990. He founded the Center for Land Use Interpretation in 1994, and has directed the Center from its home base in Culver City, California, since then. He lectures at numerous universities, has been on the faculty of the California College of Art, and has served on the Board of Directors of the Holt/Smithson Foundation. Under his guidance, the Center has produced dozens of publications, public programs, and exhibitions shown at its primary exhibition space in Los Angeles and at other temporary and permanent Center facilities in places that include Hinkley, California, Wendover, Utah, Houston, Texas, and Troy, New York. The Center has also presented programming at other institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.
Slide Show
Praise
“Although many of the images take on a deadpan approach of showing the Santa Maria Valley’s lifeless landscape of leeched soil and plastics, there are also intimate close-up images that evoke more sentimental queries. The photos are bold and subtle but collectively invite us to take a closer look at the harsh realities of the extraction and production processes that occur at all costs for consumption. Kallusky reminds us of our cyclical relationship with nature, one of life and destruction.”
—Sarah Knobel, Lenscratch
“Landfill tells the story of the massive amounts of agricultural and industrial waste in one Central California valley with deep roots to the Indigenous and Spanish past. It is a meaningful addition to how we understand our way of life in this current moment in the larger climate crisis. Brought together in a gorgeous book, the images reveal an unpleasant reality tucked conveniently out of view. Brett Kallusky’s work shows a poise and formality, a photographic deliberateness that presents these intensely critical issues—ones we like to keep out of sight—with seriousness and gravity. The photographs, in their studied intentionality and careful elegance, insist on the urgency of the situation and the inevitable doom that awaits if we continue to ignore what is happening all around us.”
—Rebecca A. Senf, Ph.D., Chief Curator, Center for Creative Photography