GWEN WALSTRAND | After All, 2024

After All 

These photographs are made in a time of fear and uncertainty. Contemplating the future world, though, also requires us to recognize the hope and ingenuity embodied literally and figuratively in its young citizens. Our responses to wildness, beauty, human nature, and the complicated forces behind each determines our future and our children’s. These hopeful photographic figments are presented to emphasize our inherent fragility, resiliency, and connectedness. “There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead – as if innocence had ever been – and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us.”  -- Annie Dillard

BIO

Gwen Walstrand is a Springfield, Missouri based artist and Professor of Photography at Missouri State University. Gwen has exhibited and presented her visual work in national and international exhibitions including in Italy, Finland, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, and throughout the United States. Her work has been published in Orion Magazine-Nature/Culture/Place and in two editions of Christopher James’ Book of Alternative Photographic Processes. Gwen’s photographs have been collected by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Mulvane Art Museum in Topeka, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock, as well as by private collections.