Mark Baugh-Sasaki has centered his practice on the ever-shifting dynamics that connect humans and the environment, continually returning to the relationship between how we define “place” and how it defines us. The artist contends that terms such as “nature” and “natural landscape” are inherently problematic and biased, leading him to explore how those terms have influenced and reshaped our understanding of the environment, as well as our role within it.

Baugh-Sasaki’s recent artistic practice examines geology’s role in signifying our collective — and individual — presence in time and space, our relationship to our environment, and as a vessel for human events and experiences. In his latest body of work, entitled Transect, the artist investigates the latticed influences of geology, photography, and the landscape on his own perceptions of place. Returning to and documenting the same geographic locations over multiple years, his work bears witness to the effects wrought by nature and, increasingly, by human-centered climate change.