Children play on stone steps descending to a river, where others swim and paddle boats. A decorative wrought-iron chair sits empty on the sandy beach, while lush green trees frame the peaceful waterside scene under a partly cloudy sky.

Julie Blackmon

The Landing, 2026

archival pigment print

available in 26" x 33.5" (edition of 10), 36" x 46.9" (edition of 10), 44" x 57.6" (edition of 10)

"The Landing," features my extended family and friends, the people I see every day, most of whom live within a mile of where I’ve spent the last sixty years. It was made on the Finley River in southwest Missouri, a river that is hardly a destination except to those of us who live here. And yet, to us, it can feel like heaven. That contradiction interests me: the possibility of paradise in an ordinary place, and the knowledge that even paradise contains uncertainty. On the wall is a can of OFF, deliberately left in the picture. Ticks have become a source of real anxiety here, particularly with the growing awareness of alpha-gal syndrome. Suddenly the woods and grasses we’ve moved through all our lives carry a different kind of threat. But the can of OFF is also, for me, about something larger. It is an acknowledgment of all the things we cannot control, the fears and dangers that exist just outside the frame, or sometimes right inside it. Our awareness that things can go wrong and our stubborn desire to live anyway. To find Lake Como, in a sense, in a little river in the middle of America. - Julie Blackmon

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