The Critical Zone presents new landscape photographs by Katherine Wolkoff that describe the geological, botanical and zoological markings visible in “the critical zone,” earth’s permeable layer which extends from the tops of the trees to the bottom of the ground water.

Scientists argue that this zone—where rock, soil water and air meet—will characterize the future environmental health of the earth.

Like a scientific researcher, Wolkoff travels to public lands throughout the United States to photograph the landscape of the critical zone. She uses a range of techniques from the 4×5 view camera to a flatbed scanner, utilizing subjective post-production techniques that expand the photography beyond science.  The work in this show is notable that it is her first body of black and white photographs.

The elements collected for these photographs show millions of years of geologic change—from evidence of sliding glaciers to traces of disappeared oceans. Today, these places are being affected in new ways due to rising temperatures and the effects of climate change in our current epoch, the Anthropocene. Black sand is churned up by hurricanes, invasive insects consume trees, and icebergs melt in plain sight.

The photographs in The Critical Zone leave the viewer unsure about where they stand, the scale and point of view are vertiginous. It is also unclear what the future holds for the state of the natural world.

Katherine Wolkoff was born in 1976 in Indiana and received her MFA from Yale University, where was the winner of the Richard Dixon Welling Prize.

Wolkoff photographs range from the miniature landscapes of Deer Beds to Birds, a series of silhouettes of taxidermied birds amassed by naturalist and educator Elizabeth Dickens in the early 20^th century. Much of her work turns around dichotomies of absence and presence, as in the deer whose sleep is invoked in matted grass on Block Island or the specter of life in the colorless yet dynamic outlines of stuffed birds.

At times Wolkoff uses light and perspective to skew our traditional view of an object; other times she confronts a scene with forthright, often understated directness, allowing its unmediated presence to convey a strangeness that is by turns eerie and comforting.

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