ELISE RASMUSSEN: the beautiful

Night Gallery is pleased to announce the beautiful, an exhibition of new work by Elise Rasmussen, presented in conjunction with PST Art: Art & Science Collide and made possible in part by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Puffin Foundation. This is the artist’s debut solo exhibition at Night Gallery and follows the gallery’s screening of the artist’s 2020 film, The Year Without a Summer, and her participation in Blue State, a formative group exhibition in 2018.

Grief permeates Elise Rasmussen’s solo show the beautiful. Her photographs, shot on medium-format film in and around national parks of the American West, respond both to climate change and to the narrative of stolen land that cannot be uncoupled from the origin stories of our national parks. Rasmussen captures sites of creativity, preservation, climate emergency, and imperialist violence. How to reconcile the undeniable beauty of the landscapes, evidenced in Rasmussen’s photographs, with America’s fraught past—and present? In this suite, Rasmussen offers an elegy both cultural and ecological, macro and micro, as she depicts a changing western landscape.

Many of the photographs include images of fire, an apt visual metaphor for this series, with its evocations of cremation and funeral pyres. Rasmussen traveled by car throughout the West with her terrier Clementine, making regular stops to shoot at national parks and adjacent BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land. She camped just outside the parks’ limits so that she could light unrestricted campfires before bedding down; two photographs shown here capture flames dwarfed by twilit desert skies. Fire also figures in works like last breaths (Sequoias), 2024, which depicts the struggling gasps of a tree in the aftermath of the 2021 KNP Complex Fire, which decimated California’s Sequoia National Forest.

During her road trip, Rasmussen hit iconic “photo-ops” such as the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone Park and Robert Smithson’s famed land artwork Spiral Jetty on the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. These sites are so frequently photographed that they are seared into the “American” consciousness, but Rasmussen expertly presents them from new vantages, in some instances using collage to create continuous landscapes. 

Although Rasmussen's work advocates for preservation, it also acknowledges another truth: We constantly lose what we once believed to be constant. We can never fully protect or restore it, only acknowledge its fleeting gorgeousness.

—Cat Kron