Terri Warpinski – “Restless”
On display JULY 7 – SEPTEMBER 24, 2025
Show Description: This research intensive, lens-based, mixed media, assemblage and installation work is rooted in the histories and futures of our fragile ecosystem.
Artist Talk and Reception: Join us on Thursday, July 17 from 6:00pm to 8:30pm to hear from artist, Terri Warpinski. Free and open to the public. RSVP here.
A Selection of works on exhibit
About the Work:
I am particularly interested in unfolding the complex and messy patterns of our species’ impacts on the environment, and our ongoing renegotiation of its value to all forms of life. This project started five years ago, during the pandemic's isolation and travel restrictions, to examine land preserves and conservation areas undergoing re-wilding and ecological recovery near my home in Northeastern Wisconsin. Part manifesto and part lament, this project now extends outwards along the Niagara Escarpment, probes the Great Lakes watershed and beyond; to further understand the unfathomable tragic losses our fragile planet is experiencing due to the rapid warming of the Earth.
Restless Earth disrupts traditional notions of landscape photography through the use of multiple frames and fractured views, providing an opportunity for reflection on symbiotic relationships and systems. Through the integration of text in multiple forms, and the incorporation of found objects and materials, relationships are forged between personal, cultural and natural histories.
Some works in Restless Earth invite the viewer to contemplate weightless immersion into places where sky, water, land and forest crown merge into one; while others quietly confront us with reminders of our shameless abuse and overconsumption of nature’s gifts. Manipulations of space and scale invite the viewer to reflect on the passage of time and divergent ways of knowing place, reminding us of the magic and awe present in our local environments and encouraging engagement with and protection of our local forests. Ultimately, this project is a visual reflection of climate resilience in which communities can anticipate and manage climate impacts, minimize damage and plan for recovery and transformation.
Through this work I seek to make visible a state of mind, a way of perceiving and connecting information and ideas across time and space that are not entirely visual in nature and in doing so, construct a narrative that is multi-stranded and open-ended addressing various notions related to time, observation, destruction and restoration, the accumulation of knowledge and the shadow of memory embedded in place.
About the Artist:
Terri Warpinski explores the complex relationship between personal, cultural and natural histories through her lens-based, mixed media creative practice. Her current work, Restless Earth, draws attention to her home ground in the Great Lakes Watershed and the urgent necessity for ecological recovery, restoration and re-wilding in response to our global environmental crisis. For over four decades her various projects have taken her throughout the American West and Mexico, Australia, Western and Central Europe, the Middle East and Iceland. She was distinguished as a Fulbright Senior Fellow to Israel in 2000-2001, as Professor Emerita of Art in 2016 after a 32-year career teaching at the University of Oregon, was the Honored Educator of Society for Photographic Education in 2018, and most recently was awarded the Carol Crow Fellowship for Environmental Photography by the Houston Center for Photography in 2024.
Her extensive exhibition record includes the Pingyao International Festival of Photography in China; the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem; Houston International Fotofest; the Center for Photography in Woodstock, New York; the University of the Arts in Philadelphia; and Camerawork in San Francisco. She was awarded a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) Fellowship to Berlin to begin her long-term project Death|s|trip. Her limited-edition artist books (Sagebrush, 1999 Surface Tension, 2016), and collaborative broadside portfolios (Liminal Matter: Fences, 2017 and Liminal Matter:Traces,2018) with Portland poet Laura Winter are in numerous public and special collections including Stanford University; The Bancroft at UC-Berkeley; Beinecke Library, Yale; Book Arts Collection, Baylor University; Amherst College; and the Getty Research Institute. She is a member of the Environmental Photography Collective www.environmentalphotographers.com.
A native of Northeastern Wisconsin, she once again resides in that glacially carved landscape and ancestral home of the Ho-Chunk (Hoocąk) and Menominee (Kāēyās maceqtawak) Nations along the Fox River in De Pere with her husband, David Graham