Margot Samel is pleased to present Lost Canyon, a new suite of paintings by Anne Wehrley Björk (b. 1948, Farmington, NM). Based between Charleston, South Carolina and Lexington, Kentucky, this is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The works in the exhibition take their point of departure from Chaco Canyon, a remote stretch of western New Mexico and the site of an ancient gathering place. Björk has returned to this landscape for more than five decades, working with a deliberately restricted palette and a focused vocabulary of forms. In Lost Canyon she engages this largely mysterious archaeological site to extract new meaning grounded in the land, while exploring the more esoteric task of deciphering the present in painted forms.

Anne Wehrley Björk grew up in Farmington, New Mexico, in the far northwestern corner of the state, where landforms stretch languidly across the vast San Juan Basin, encompassing the present-day Four Corners region. At the center of this arid depression, down a nearly dry river valley, lies Chaco Canyon, its monumental stone and adobe architecture marking what was once the epicenter of civilization in the American Southwest between 850 and 1250 C.E. This region lies within Diné Bikéyah, or Navajoland, and within the present-day boundaries of the Navajo Nation. It is the main site of the Chaco Culture, known to us through the remnants of its complex architectural plan and the imposing stone structures built into the sandstone walls of the canyon that remain remarkably intact. The ancient Chacoans left behind a vast constellation of petroglyphs that hint at their mastery of archeoastronomy, their sophisticated trade networks, and artefacts that raise as many questions as they answer. In this landscape, the ground is rust- and shell-colored, and the canyon walls of sandstone—which is soft to the touch—are etched in the stark, high-altitude light. It is from this terrain, both majestic and enigmatic, that Björk’s painterly sensibility emerges.

Anne Wehrley Björk spent time in this vast landscape as a child, camping at Chaco Canyon with her family. The wide-open spaces and remnants of an ancient civilization embedded themselves in her imagination and formed an early visual and emotional imprint that she has returned to throughout her practice. However, to say that she paints this place, or that she paints the landscape, is not quite accurate. Although she draws on recollection and refers to the canyon walls as the “bones” of her compositions, her subject is the emotional impact of a place as it transforms over time. Her paintings function as spaces of remembrance, spiritual resonance, and states of being. The spatial qualities created by swathes of parchment white are the spatial qualities within a canyon; they are the experience of the canyon. This interior landscape continues across her work as a rigorous process of trial and error.