Kija Lucas

Lot #42
In Search of Home, Montezuma 296, 2015
Archival Pigment Print
42.75 x 32.75 in.
Edition 1 of 5
Courtesy of Simon Breitbard Fine Arts, San Francisco

About the Artwork

Kija Lucas uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage, and inheritance, investigating how seemingly inconsequential moments create changes that last generations. Lucas’s project In Search of Home ties the emigration patterns of her family to the racial taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus through scans of plant clippings, rocks, and other objects. This botanical clipping was taken from a roadside at the edge of a farm once owned by the artist’s great-grandparents in Montezuma, Iowa. The pursuit of this work has thus far carried Lucas through thirteen states including California. With an eye to cultivated plants and weeds as well as native and non-native species, Lucas asks viewers to consider how we choose what is natural, beautiful, and useful. Lucas’s work has been exhibited at Oakland Museum of California, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, Headlands Center for the Arts, and San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, as well as Venice Arts in Los Angeles; La Sala d’Ercole/Hercules Hall in Bologna, Italy; and Casa Escorsa in Guadalajara, Mexico, among others. She is a member of 3.9 Art Collective and the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure.

Retail Value: $5,000