Fragmented histories, loss, and the labor of remembering are central to the work of Star Montana. Working across video and installation, she traces the contours of absence, what is left behind, what refuses to disappear, and what quietly persists.
This video work emerged from a residency in the Anza-Borrego Desert, a landscape that holds a deep but broken connection to her own diasporic lineage. She was drawn not to the grand vistas, but to the washes, the dry riverbeds where the Colorado/Sonora microphyll woodlands take hold. Here, smoke tree, velvet mesquite, and catclaw thrive in seeming stillness. The velvet mesquite became a kind of anchor: a living thing that asks nothing but offers everything: shade, sustenance, a place to rest. “In its presence,” Montana asserts, “I began to exist as myself and as part of something older.”
The video moves between visibility and dissolution. Figures appear and fade into the desert light, pressing their bodies into the heat, the rocks, the sun, refusing to be forgotten. Washland Spirituals is not documentation, but rather a meditation on duration and the insistent presence of those who enter the landscape not to conquer it, but to be held by it.
