Amy Elkins: A Place Where We Are in the Sun

Amy Elkins: A Place Where We Are in the Sun 

In A Place Where We Are in the Sun, Amy Elkins, an eighth-generation Angeleno, traces her blended Indigenous, Mexican, and European ancestry across Southern California. Exploring landscapes between Lompoc and Los Angeles, Elkins returns to places tied to her family’s history—where they lived, worked, and gathered. She stages altered reproductions of family photographs within these sites and then re-photographs them. Through this process, Elkins transforms traditional black-and-white pictures into layered, porous collages where past and present meet, and figures and environments begin to merge. These sites are not passive backdrops but active participants through which memory is revisited and reimagined.

Though grounded in her personal history, the work invites viewers to consider how belonging and connection to place intersect with their own stories. By reuniting family photographs with these landscapes—spaces now irrevocably transformed by environmental change, overdevelopment, and gentrification—Elkins does not attempt to restore the past, but instead seeks meaningful ways to reconnect with it.

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Road to Alaxuluxen / Chumash Painted Cave State Historic Park (wild lilac) [detail]  2023
Amy Elkins (b. 1979) 
archival pigment print  
Courtesy of the artist