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Since the late 1980s, the subjects of Rebeca Méndez’s photographic series have included industrial sites, hotel beds, landscapes, seascapes, and natural patterning. Her works are studies in the everyday, in stillness and emptiness, as well as in isolating the temporal in phenomena.

In 2004, Méndez began her Homeland series consisting of extreme panoramic landscapes of what she calls ‘ever sustaining landscapes’—landscapes and seascapes being farmed and quarried for daily human nourishment and consumption. Méndez’s interest is to give the viewer a glimpse of these raw materials in their integrity and beauty, as well as expose the cost of convenience—the distribution and processing of these goods before they are conveniently packaged for consumption.

Her landscapes and seascapes are carefully planned images of sea or land and sky in which the horizon line bisects each picture. In her compositions, she creates new, non-existent landscapes where glaciers float over puffy clouds and Nordic cows graze on top of tropical waters. Using her own documentary photography from far-flung places like Patagonia and the Sahara desert, Méndez’s landscapes invite the viewer to see beyond the horizon, which she views as ‘the perpetual aim of humanity.’ Méndez sees this tendency as a double-edged sword, and instilled in her images is this sense of ambivalence. Each of the six compositions has an overall dominating color – red, orange, yellow, blue, green and white. The first five of those colors correspond to the United States’ Department of Homeland Security’s National Alert Threat Levels: red corresponding to ‘severe’ and green corresponding to low’. Méndez realized that ‘peace’—currently the most important ambition for humanity—and its corresponding color, white, were missing from the chart, and it became her sixth composition. Her subtle critique, in her words, ‘exposes the sadly backward state of affairs of the current United States government.’

Placed in each landscape is a short line of text—an observation, or a description of what might be outside the frame—’till the last tree’ over an image of cows grassing, pointing back at Méndez’s interpretation of the core theme of the images as ‘ever sustaining landscapes.’

Méndez’s latest photographic work About to Happen series, 2006, consists of still frames of her 16mm film shoot throughout Iceland. By isolating a single frame of an infinite repetition, Méndez images move beyond appearance and expose temporality in phenomena. In ‘Dettifoss 001–003’, Méndez captures an instant of Europe’s largest waterfall—500 cubic metres per second, and in ‘Brekka 001–003’, luscious tall green rye grass is forcefully blown by the wind.

‘Rebeca Méndez Each Day at Noon’ at ANDLAB ART Gallery features works from Méndez’s Homeland 3 and About to Happen series.

List of Works: HOMELAND 3, 2006 Homeland 3, Peace White Homeland 3, Low Green Homeland 3, Guarded Blue Homeland 3, Elevated Yellow Homeland 3, High Orange Homeland 3, Severe Red

Size of each (6) piece: 40 X 15 inches Materials: Chromagenic Print and Plexiglas.

ABOUT TO HAPPEN, 2006 Dettifoss 001 – 003 (Triptych) Kárahnjúkar 001 – 003 (Triptych) Brekka 001 – 003 (Triptych)

Size of each (9) piece: 15 high X 21 wide inches Materials: Chromagenic Print and Plexiglas.