This week we welcome Nancy Gesimondo, a mixed-media artist and interior designer whose work addresses environmental preservation. She is the recipient of grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts and The Queens Council on the Arts. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at The Queens Museum and The Palm Springs Art Museum.
Gesimondo has recently produced a series of photographic assemblages comprised of images of herself in natural and other worldly environments. Her Influences include pioneering eco-feminist artists such as Anne Brigman and Judy Chicago, who have also been photographed in nature. In 2024, her image “Seeing” from this series was awarded the Grand Prize by the The New York Center for Photographic Art. This body of work consists of photo-based assemblages of herself in Dead Horse Bay and the Salton Sea, two toxic environments on either end of the United States. The work often incorporates ephemeral materials gathered at these sites inside of convex glass frames. The vintage ocular-shaped, convex-glass frames magnify the concept of a portal to highlight the preciousness of nature and our collective responsibility for its preservation.
Dead Horse Bay– now a landfill leaking radioactive contamination – is a small body of water off Barren Island, near the Rockaways in Brooklyn. It is also known as Glass Bottle Beach, as it is littered with so much broken glass that it creates an eerie tinkling sound as the waves ebb and flow. Bombay Beach is part of the Salton Sea, a landlocked, highly saline body of water in Southern California that was once a recreational playground, and is now evidence of man’s poor stewardship of the natural environment.
“While photographs of oneself are often assumed to be self-portraits, my point with these images is to embody a persona and become something other than myself. The figure is integrated into the landscape in various ways, often drawing upon themes of a priestess performing sacred rituals conveying a deeply rooted connection to, and reverence for the natural world,” she writes.
See more of Gesimondo’s work on her website and Instagram.
