SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- EUQINOM Gallery announces A Geological Survey, the first solo exhibition of Rose Marie Cromwell with the gallery. Featuring her most recent body of work, begun in 2022 and continuing to the present, the exhibition offers a deeply personal reflection on identity, coming-of-age, and familial relationships through the intertwined lenses of landscape, memory, and time.
Cromwell is a photo and video artist whose practice examines the effects of globalization on local communities and the delicate balance between the political and the spiritual. In A Geological Survey, she turns her gaze toward the American West—the region where she was raised—to explore the layered histories—personal, environmental, and cultural—that shape her understanding of place and belonging.
The series follows Cromwell, her mother, and her young daughter as they journey through the Western United States. Interspersed among these portraits are images of found and constructed scenes—ruins of mining camps, abstracted landscapes, and talismanic rocks—that trace both the scars and the resilience of the land. By reinterpreting the Western landscape, long depicted as a site of conquest and masculine idealization, Cromwell reframes it from the perspective of a mother and environmentalist. Her images propose a new way of seeing the land—not as separate from the self, but as an extension of identity, memory, and future generations.
“In this project,” Cromwell writes, “I examine the complicated history of the Western U.S. in the context of my personal experience growing up in the region. The work is grounded in memories of road trips from my childhood but reframed through my experience of motherhood and anxiety about my daughter’s future. I aim to create images that reflect my spiritual relationship with the West while acknowledging its long history of exploitation.”
Among the works featured in the exhibition is The Cave, inspired by a visit to Wind Cave in the Black Hills—sacred to the Lakota Sioux as the site of ancestral emergence. Cromwell connects this mythology to her own experience of childbirth, envisioning the cave as a portal between worlds and a symbol of transformation. In In the Dry Flowers and The Field, relationships between generations are tenderly portrayed as her daughter’s gestures echo those of herself and her mother, suggesting the cyclical nature of life and inherited memory.
A signature piece of the show, Fissure, a paper quilt, extends Cromwell’s photographic practice into material experimentation. Composed of three interwoven images, the work functions as a visual tapestry that contemplates time, impermanence, and the constancy of matter. The quilt form—rooted in traditions of labor, care, and storytelling—becomes a metaphor for the layering of memory and the fluidity of non-linear narratives within photography.
Throughout the exhibition, themes of reflection and measurement recur: the rings of a fallen redwood, the space between pebbles placed along a spine, and the mirror as a symbol of both self-awareness and landscape memory. The final works contemplate decay and extraction, aligning the collapse of mined terrain with the reclining gestures of her family lying in repose.
Evoking nostalgia, the unremitting passage of time, and an uncertain ecological future, A Geological Survey meditates on intergenerational bonds and the legacies we leave behind. By situating intimate family portraits within broader social and environmental contexts, Cromwell redefines the conventions of landscape photography and expands the boundaries of how we picture the land—and ourselves—within it.
Rose Marie Cromwell (b. 1983, Sacramento, CA; based in Miami, FL) is a photographer and artist whose work examines the effects of globalization on local communities and the delicate intersection between the political and the spiritual. Her first monograph, El Libro Supremo de la Suerte (TIS Books, 2018), received the Light Work Photo Book Prize and was named one of the “25 Best Photobooks of 2018” by TIME Magazine. In 2021, she published two additional books: Eclipse (TIS Books) and A More Fluid Atmosphere (Pomegranate Press). Cromwell’s first solo museum exhibition was held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami in 2024. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco and at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant, a Getty Reportage Grant, and was an Artist-in-Residence at Light Work. Cromwell’s work is included in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
