Marley Trigg Stewart: The Hills Keep Burning in California

About

The selection of work on view in the exhibition is an amalgam of personal history that acknowledges the unknowability of the past and how it haunts the present. Trigg Stewart began working on a series of photographs during the summer of 2020, a time marked by the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. In that charged summer, Trigg Stewart discovered that his estranged father’s brother, Greg, died of AIDS related complications on Halloween in 1991, two years prior to his own birth in 1993. Set against the backdrop of a cross country trip Trigg Stewart took with his partner, this news instigated an exploration into family archive, landscape, queer ancestry, and memory. 

Presenting pictures taken of found photographs and original photos, The Hills Keep Burning in California brings the past and the present into a non-linear conversation. His uncle Greg’s presence and absence infuse the collection with an aura of loss and the sense that relations between family members, and between one’s self and the environment, are always unfathomable. Using light leaks in some of the photographs, Trigg Stewart distends the realistic color palette of the frame by introducing glowing streaks of red, blue, yellow, orange, and magenta not native to the original representation. In doing this, Trigg Stewart allows an uncontrollable intervention - light -  to abstract his images, bringing them closer to pictorial and compositional values we associate with painting. These manipulations also hint at memory’s unintelligible qualities, imbuing them with aleatory beauty.  

With these photographs, Trigg Stewart has articulated a queer, Black poetics that prioritizes unflinching intimacy, agency, and an interest in expanding the graphic possibilities of the photographic image. He sees some of the images in this exhibition as depicting “pastoral images of a sort.” Thus we see a vista of the Arroyo Seco in Altadena, near to where Trigg Stewart grew up in Southern California. This region inspired the Arroyo Seco school of plein air painting, which included proponents of California Impressionism. Trigg Stewart contrasts this image with another kind of landscape, the cemetery in the Presidio Park in San Francisco, where his uncle, who briefly served in the Navy, is buried among seemingly endless rows of veterans. He intersperses these images with self-portraits, and photographs of his father and brother, inducing the viewer into a hallucinatory walk through time and terrain. 

The title of the exhibition comes from the Ocean Vuong poem, “Reasons for Staying”. Trigg Stewart’s collection of images acknowledges loss and poignancy without wistfulness. “The AIDS pandemic isn’t over,” Trigg Stewart notes, “and neither is COVID, or systemic racism.” With an eye bent on creation and imagination amidst these persistent crises, The Hills Keep Burning in California is a journey into one young artist’s reclamation of his own story and black male survival by communicating across time and space with his departed uncle.