Landfall

Created from images taken during the early 1980s, Mimi Plumb’s Landfall encapsulates the anxieties of a world spinning out of balance, a mirror-land eerily reminiscent of our own time. The burnt out remains of a house fire open out onto equally decimated alpine landscapes, group shots of humans in lackadaisical embrace with high tech weapons of war...Plumb’s photographs of manmade scars and refuse mingle in seductive rhythm with portraits of friends and strangers in disquieting poses, revelling in the underlying unease the artist saw in herself, her community, and the world at large. “Years later the burnt lamp reminded me of when I was 9 years old, during the Cuban missile crisis in 1963, my mother told me there might be a nuclear war. For a period of time I would wake up in the middle of the night to repeatedly look at the hallway clock, and worried about not sleeping. At school, my classmates and I practiced getting under our desks.” Plumb's jarring yet delicate approach to image-making comes together in Landfall to fuel a narrative as foreboding as it is beautiful.