Meghann Riepenhoff: State Shift
Haines Gallery proudly presents State Shift, our second solo exhibition with artist Meghann Riepenhoff. Opening in tandem with SF Art Week 2025, this highly anticipated show debuts a poetic, visceral, and personal body of work that expands Riepenhoff’s collaboration with both the cyanotype and the environment.
Riepenhoff creates her cyanotypes directly within the landscape, allowing the elements to leave physical inscriptions on paper coated with photographic materials. Marking an important breakthrough in her practice, State Shift sees the introduction of new pigments and gestures into Riepenhoff’s process. The signature inky indigos and glacial blues of her cyanotypes are transformed with vivid flashes of green, coral, magenta, and shimmering metallic hues, the result of organic materials (mica, mushroom ink, and gingko chlorophyll) and manufactured pigments (a nod to the human presence in the landscape). Striking colors and patterns branch and bloom across the paper’s surface, calling to mind both natural forms — the movement of water; webbing rivers and streams; mycelial networks, underground roots, and algae blooms — as well as the gestural flourishes of sumi ink paintings.
The title State Shift, which names both the exhibition and the series on view, is a geological term describing dramatic and sudden changes to ecosystems — often when critical thresholds are crossed. The artist personally experienced one form of this catalyzing phenomenon in early 2024, when an extreme weather event caused extensive damage to her Pacific Northwest home. The works in State Shift were made during this time of displacement, which Riepenhoff used as an opportunity to explore national sites highly compromised by human intervention. These include Miami Beach, FL, considered a “ground zero” of the climate crisis, barraged by recurring storms and threatened by rising sea levels; and the former town of Moncton, WA, which was completely submerged in 1915 when an ill-advised dam was constructed to provide Seattle with power and water.
Riepenhoff's increased mark-making in State Shift draws attention to these devastating effects of climate change. She flings pigment onto paper, uses her breath to move liquid media, drapes paper across carved earthen contours, and presses her hands onto the surfaces of her works. Her actions serve as an allegory for the human impacts on the landscape. They are also gestures of protest against the systems of power and policies that drive these changes, and an attempt to reconnect with the landscape itself.
“The physical nature of my work, where photography-based media come in contact with rain, waves, wind, and wintry environments, is a call to be in closer contact with our environment, in a time of deep separation between humans and our ecosystems,” Riepenhoff has said. In issuing this call — both to herself and to viewers — the artist invites us all to consider the personal and collective shifts we might make to preserve our shared home. State Shift emerged from difficulty and explores sites of climate devastation, but is rooted in the possibilities of transformation and hope. “Hope,” the author and activist Rebecca Solnit has written, “is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written.”
State Shift coincides with Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene, a major group exhibition opening at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in February 2025 that features Riepenhoff's work. Originating at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, Second Nature will travel to the Anchorage Museum, AK following its presentation at the Cantor.
