Landscape, often seen as external or passive, is recast here as an active field of identity formation. From the digitally reconstructed Caribbean backdrops in Ruby Rumié’s portraits, where local subjects hold their favorite dishes in defiance of colonial visual archives, to Adam Straus’s sublime skies layered with headlines and digital symbols, landscape becomes both witness and battleground. Pedro Ruiz gilds scenes of poppy fumigation with reverent irony, exposing the spiritual cost of state violence. Gregg Louis abstracts constellations from stains on his studio floor, pointing to a cosmic intimacy in the smallest of gestures.

Language threads through the exhibition not only as text but as a material condition of selfhood. Lesley Dill wraps the human form in phrases by Dickinson and Kafka, turning words into psychological thresholds. In Hugo Bastidas’s grisaille paintings, metaphoric ruins and imagined catastrophes speak to global crises through a deliberately monochrome lens, drawing parallels between historical myth and contemporary collapse. Carol K. Brown’s ethereal watercolors follow a vanishing figure through dreamlike environments, while Julie Hedrick’s luminous fields offer color as a sensory language, where perception becomes a form of knowledge and communion.

Together, these works reject the illusion of identity as fixed, coherent, or complete. Instead, they reveal the self as a shifting construction formed through fractured memories, contested landscapes, inherited language, and personal mythologies. ATLAS TO THE SELF asks urgent questions: Who gets to define belonging? What histories persist beneath the surface? And how can we reclaim the narratives that shape us? In this exhibition, identity is not a destination but a terrain—layered, unstable, and alive. Each work functions as a cartographic act, not of place, but of becoming: a mapping of the self in constant motion.