2023 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow: Tia-Simone Gardner

Banner image: Chronotopophobia, video still.

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This is the fourth in a series of articles profiling the six distinguished artists chosen as 2023 McKnight Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant program for mid-career artists in Minnesota that is administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The 2023 cohort includes Tia-Simone Gardner, Kaamil A. Haider, Keren Kroul, Sieng Lee, Mark Ostapchuk, and Lindsay Rhyner.

Their two-year fellowship will culminate this spring with a McKnight Discussion Series:

Thursday, March 27, 2025: Adriel Luis (curator and artist) in conversation with Kaamil A. Haider, Keren Kroul, and Mark Ostapchuk

Thursday, April 10, 2025: Katie Pfohl (Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Detroit Institute of Art) in conversation with Tia-Simone Gardner, Sieng Lee, and Lindsay Rhyner

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Photo by Rik Sferra, courtesy of MCAD.

 

When you go to Tia-Simone Gardner’s website to look at her artwork, you are met instead with a wall of water. Whether on your phone or your laptop, you get the same thing: an undulating, mesmerizing close-up video of dark, loping waves. It could be a sea, though there’s no foam — freshwater, it seems, so a lake perhaps, or maybe a river. The waves come one after the other at a quick pace, so you might notice intuitive calm of moving water giving way to a subtle, agitated sense of overwhelm. You click on the hamburger menu — blank, empty. No links leading into the site, no navigation of any kind. It’s a dead end, of sorts. The only reward is to simply give in and watch the waves.

When I bring up her impenetrable website during our studio visit in Saint Paul, she winces and laughs bashfully, “I need to fix it.” The choice is intentional, she says, but the waves are really a place-holder for something more expansive, more eccentric, a project she developed in a workshop at the School for Poetic Computation that perhaps someday she will publish. “I have been thinking about how I want my website to be a reflection of my practice, this archival impulse. I don't want it to just be an information location; I want it to feel like a study room. And I want it to be kind of weird and fun.”

For now, we have the water, and if you spend a minute or two with the looping video, I think you do learn something about Gardner’s practice: it is one of prolonged observation, of seeing familiar things anew by looking longer and looking closer. Her work, which spans a variety of media including video, photography, sculpture, collage, and installation, is an investigation of the ways that water and land and place can both conceal and reveal history on this continent, like the murky shapes you might start to notice just beneath the surface of her homepage. “At some point I realized geography was the thing that I was interested in,” she explains. “I think my question is, if we know landscape has a political, historical, social past, how slow do you need to move in order to see it?”

School brought her north from her home in Alabama, first to Pennsylvania for an MFA and then to Minnesota for a PhD in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the U. It’s always interesting to talk to another southerner about Minnesota — we tend to see this place in a very particular light. There’s a strange kinship between this state and certain parts of the South, one that mirrors both the bad as well as the good. The two places are connected quite literally by the Mississippi River, from its headwaters at Lake Itasca to the river’s mouth just outside of New Orleans. With that comes a connected history of trade and migration, both voluntary and forced, up and down the long and winding river. Gardner has driven up and down the Mississippi several times, grappling with the history its slow, constant current is hiding.

It’s not exactly a lazy river — this is the Mighty Mississippi, after all — but it takes its time. The river’s water takes all of three months to make it from head to mouth, starting at an average pace of barely one mile an hour, according to the National Park Service. The river’s destination, it should be noted, is now designated by the Park Service as “the Gulf of America.” When this foolishness comes up in our conversation, Gardner says it plainly: “Maps are lies. With maps, we think we're seeing something, but actually what we're seeing is power. We’re looking at how someone chooses to represent their political interest in a place.”

 

Top: An old map of Mississippi River shoreline properties displayed as part of the artist's 2022 exhibition Dark and Perfect Memories. Photo courtesy of Gallery 44. Bottom: There's Something in the Water, video still of plantation house.

 

If maps are lies, maybe the truth is to be found on the ground. Gardner went looking for it, taking a road trip to New Orleans while wearing a body camera to record surveillance footage of her findings. In one video, which she completed with her collaborator and friend Monica Moses Haller, she drives us past a prison — a low, concrete compound ringed with barbwire cooking in the Louisiana sun. Further down the road, the car pulls into the driveway of a dilapidated plantation house.

On the water, she records her body’s view of a ferry-ride, always pointing towards the horizon to spy on the landscape — no people in sight, just a focus on where the built environment and the natural one intersect. Gardner never seems interested in capturing video of any residents. “This is a surveillance technology or a war technology,” she says, “and I don't want to turn that on people, because the people I would be turning it on are Black people.” The absence of people lends the videos an eerie flatness, like listening to a pocket-dialed phone call and hearing only the muffled sounds of movement. The bodies are there, but you can’t see them, like the inmates on the other side of those prison walls. Instead, Gardner says, “what I am productively stuck on now is how do you tell landscape stories?”

What she is creating is a People’s History without the people, though the absence — or erasure — of bodies is part of the point. “It's a blind process,” she says of filming with a bodycam. “There's no viewfinder. You don't know what the camera is seeing while you're shooting. And I really enjoyed working that way because I just had to trust my physical self.” The body is there but reduced to a tripod. It’s an inversion of how we normally experience bodycam footage: as the video diary of bodies in power. How many times have we seen lives taken, erased, from this vantage point? How often has the video itself not been proof enough to grant those lives some justice? How often have we been told not to believe our own lying eyes?

Here Gardner presents a citizen archivist as a body of equal power, one moving through what she notes scholar Walter Johnson calls “the carceral landscape” of the Mississippi River. The finished video, There’s Something in the Water, intersperses this bodycam footage with an upbeat, 1950 educational film voiceover about the beauty of old plantation houses and the connection between the river and industry. A satellite view of Google Earth zooms us in on one plantation house before panning over to see the massive contemporary factories next to the shoreline just over the trees — same as it ever was, Gardner seems to be saying.

 

 

Later in the film, Gardner brings us archival footage of a mass baptism of Black believers — actual people making their appearance in the work at last, likely from the 1920s or ‘30s. A crowd has gathered on the shoreline to witness and participate, but one woman stands in knee-deep water, struggling in the arms of two men trying to restrain her. Text in the film connects her to the story of New Orleans “Voodoo Queen” Marie Laveau, who supposedly drowned and rose again from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. As the woman flails and kicks against the two men, the video zeroes in on her and says, of both this woman and of Laveau, “I found her there. In the river. Resisting the baptism.”

“I don't know whether she caught the Holy Spirit,” Gardner admits. It’s impossible to tell from the footage whether this woman was writhing in agony or ecstasy, in a state of rapture or resistance. “And I thought, well what if she did? What if she did catch the spirit. What if the spirit was actually someone that lived in the water that was there to protect her, not to harm her.”

 

There's Something in the Water, video still. In the center, a woman struggles while being restrained by two men.

 

The video’s next chapter opens simply with the phrase “The carceral landscape had a water birth.” Gardner takes us back to the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, then to riverboats, workers on the docks, and people hunched in fields picking cotton by hand. Then the screen fades to black. There’s Something in the Water was shown as part of her 2022 solo exhibition Dark and Perfect Memories at Toronto’s Gallery 44; also on view were close-up photos of dark waters, expressionistic charcoal drawings on top of photo transfers, digital and vintage maps of the Mississippi River from tip to tail, a black nautical compass that looks like a shooting range target, and a small model riverboat painted all black and tagged on the side with graffiti that reads “Fuck Mark Twain.”

Gardner’s practice is expansive and inquisitive. She is not just observing, she is looking for the best ways to observe, as well — trying out every medium that makes sense. In the same way that the simplicity of her current website hides a complicated sitemap underneath, her interest in landscape encompasses not just geography and topography but also the histories of race, gender, wealth, religion, and exploitation.

 

Installation views of Dark and Perfect Memories, 2022. First two photos courtesy of Gallery 44; third photo courtesy of Antenna.

 

She currently has another project underway that has taken her away from the river, focusing instead on her childhood home of Fairfield, Alabama. Industry, race, and class left their stamp on this landscape as well, specifically in the shape of a terraformed color line. You can see it on the map and even better in drone footage Gardner has shot: an embankment with a thick hedge that encircles one set of homes and housing projects and cuts those families off from their neighbors — hiding them, erasing them behind the tree-line. Again, there is an absence of people; you can’t tell the Black houses from the white houses. All you can see for sure is the divide. In Gardner’s aerial footage, you can see the streets where she grew up come to abrupt dead ends at the trees. Not cul-de-sacs, just full stops. Across the hedge to the west is the parking lot for the US Steel mill that used to be Fairfield’s lifeblood; the city’s population has been in decline since the 1960s due to a combination of white flight and many of the factory jobs moving elsewhere.

 

Chronotopophobia, video still.

 

Gardner returns to Fairfield often, attempting to capture something of a portrait of this community. Using the wide-ranging methodology typical of her practice, Gardner’s work on this project has involved interviewing her elders who still live in Fairfield, taking drone footage of the color line, making oversize cyanotypes, printmaking on the pages of WPA geological surveys, and creating collages replacing the Dead End road signs with antonyms like “Birth Birth,” “We Continue,” and “Existent Creation.” Gardner’s topics are serious, but, standing in the middle of this unfinished project in her studio, you can tell not just how experimental her practice is but how incredibly playful it is, as well. Altogether the work reads like a word cloud, finding different visual vocabularies to talk about the same thing: a family, a home, a town, a small place impacted by the same big forces that have shaped this country from the start.

“I read once that the county lines in many of the southern states were derived from the boundaries that a rider on horseback could patrol in a night. So slave patrols and horses become a technology of geography, and that's fascinating to me,” she says. “But then how on earth do you represent something like that? That's such a productive question for me.”

The other questions she finds herself grappling with are how much of the story of Fairfield is hers to tell, and given that the work is so focused on her family and her community, what is the best way to present this work without perpetuating the same exclusion the work is about? Galleries and museums are often not welcoming spaces for a lot of folks, unfortunately, and Gardner has her mind set on sharing this project with the people of Fairfield sometime this summer, perhaps in an outdoor setting.

“There's a way in which you move with a different caution when it's your family, and they're still very much alive to correct you,” she says. “I had just been thinking about what's mine to tell? I want to keep the complexity of what they've told me and not water it down and not try to simplify it.”

Writing is also a part of her expansive practice. In an essay about this new body of work titled “Chronotopophobia,” Gardner writes, “Landscape is a site of struggle for Blackness.” Topophobia is the fear of place, encompassing a wide range of anxieties around both exposure and enclosure. “To experience simultaneous, disquieted states seems to be a familiar Black way of knowing and being in the world,” she writes. “Topophobia, that thin to thick topsoil of political unrest: not quite buried, not quite visible. It is that unspeakable condition of living and breathing while Black, in place.”

“A Black landscape does not undo a carceral system," the essay continues, "but we must refuse to equivocate Blackness and carcerality. Black landscape, in all of its tangled fabulations, has more to teach us about freedom, pleasure, and imagination than about detention.”

Gardner’s focus on Black life in this place, for me, does not ignore the story of white life at all: instead, her work contextualizes it. Gardner centers the impacts of white supremacy as a means not of defining herself and her home by them so much as making sure they don’t become hidden in plain sight. It’s a story older than this country: that the ideology of “white supremacy” is nothing more than white insecurity, always eager to talk about meritocracy while at the same time putting a thumb on the scale. Gardner wants us to move more slowly, to take less for granted, to observe what is archived just under the surface of this place and the people within it. The body keeps the score, even in absence, but so too does the landscape, moving at the slowest, steadiest pace of all. Tameable, we think, but — as generations before us have known and found out —strong enough yet to still swallow us whole. ◼︎ 

 

Screenshot of the artist's website.

 

Visit Tia-Simone Gardner's website at tiasimonegardner.info or follow her on Instagram @ndgeonegro.