2025
Forty (40) sets of indigo digital press prints on Galerie Art Gloss paper in artist’s frames
51 cm x 37,5 cm each
Variable installation
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
National Geographic (Epoch) consists of forty frames containing two printed images each: recto and verso sides of clippings of photographs of mountains, amassed from the artist’s late father’s National Geographic magazine collection of the 1970s and 1980s. We see each mountain’s frontal view and adjacent is the literal and metaphorical other side. Turning each page, traversing from left to right, frame to frame, marks the passage of time and the accumulation of experience.
The piece relies on a shared encounter with vintage popular media, in this case a magazine like National Geographic. In its former ubiquity and semantic force, it can exemplify how we consider and perceive both ideas: nation and geography. Within the magazine’s name exists a paradox. The national, as it is mapped by political forces in relation to given topographies in features such as rivers and the mountain ranges that are as mighty as they are unconcerned with the designation of any border. And, the geographic, which is connected to the deep time of geological record, and yet, since the age of the enlightenment and the onset of romanticism, it has been tethered to identifications with landscape. Against this backdrop, geography as landscape, and certainly landscape photography, is an image-idea that functions as both generator and pawn in the game of national identity. Ultimately, the implications of these terms, and the images that cling to them, inform our place in the world.
There is another, more personal and lived side to National Geographic (Epoch), which exists in a free-standing text that accompanies the framed works in variable ways. The text tells a story of her father, the National Geographic subscriber. It is set in El Paso, Texas where Tan was raised. The dusty border city’s most pleasing feature being the mountain range that bisects it in two.
Photo credit: OMN / Lunds konsthall
Texts
Åsa Nacking. “3 Summers.” Lunds Konsthall, 2025.link / pdf
Exhibition History
3 Summers at Lunds Konsthall, Lund, Sweden, 2025Lisa Tan: National Geographic (Epoch) at Galleri Riis, Olso, Norway, 2026