Earth is Home

Artist’s Statement

Home is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about for the past couple of years. After 30 years in our last home, in 2021 we pulled up stakes and moved 350 miles from the Sierra Foothills to California’s Central Coast, two miles from the ocean. We moved from the hot summers and cold winters of the foothills to the moderate climate of the Central Coast where it’s never too hot or too cold and wildfires are rare. Although at first, everything was unfamiliar, at the same time I knew we had made the right choice. From the beginning, it felt like home even though I didn’t know where the grocery store was or where to find the best cappuccino. Those things came with time. But the feeling of being home was there from the start.

I’ve had similar experiences in my travels over the last eight years since I left the corporate world and have spent a lot of time exploring. Some places I’ve been to repeatedly (seven times to Iceland and three times to Mongolia and countless times to Yosemite) others only once (Japan, Brazil, the Galapagos, Norway, Germany). But all these places represent Home to me in their own ways. Travel has greatly enriched my life and my understanding of the people who share the planet with us. I am often humbled by how their life experience differs from mine.  Imagine being a Mongolian nomad living on the steppe where winter temperatures easily get to minus 40 and worse when it’s windy.  I’ve had a small taste of that. I also stood in the middle of the Gobi Desert on a summer night when there was nothing but starlight and the light from our campfire. That was the first time I experienced 360 degrees of stars from horizon to horizon. On several occasions, I have also stood in awe of mother nature watching the aurora borealis dance across the skies in Iceland. Also in Iceland, I witnessed the rare stranding of a pod of pilot whales. We were helpless and could only bear witness to one of Nature’s heart-breaking realities as the whales were in their death throes. I crave experiences like these and attempt to capture them to the best of my abilities as photographs and short films. My dad built me my first darkroom when I was 12. Last year I built what I expect to be my last darkroom 50 years later. It happens to be located just a few miles from where the likes of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams made beautiful iconic photographs at the Oceano Dunes.

But no matter where I’m living, Yosemite will always be my second home. I’ve been photographing and teaching here for over 23 years. It never gets old. Each time I drive into the Valley and catch my first glimpse of Half Dome and El Capitan, I take a deep breath and think “It’s so nice to be home…”

Curator’s Statement by Evan Russel

Where are we going?  Poet Wendell Berry once said that “the Earth is what we all have in common.”  These words have never been more prescient than where we find ourselves today.  Whether metaphorical, rhetorical, a motion to move, or a nod to fate, these are notions that must be contemplated with sincerity, and without impulse or recklessness.  We are in this together.  However, communicating this sentiment within the structure of the present seems unnaturally difficult.  So then I am reminded of another quote, this one by Ansel Adams: “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs.”

Kerik Kouklis has been photographing the landscape for decades, utilizing every format of camera to create ethereal hand-coated platinum and palladium photographs, a method almost as time-honored as the medium itself.  The descendent of Greek immigrants, he has called California a physical home his whole life.  But more to the point, he has traveled far and wide to Yosemite, Iceland, Japan, Brazil, Norway, Mongolia, Germany, and beyond, each time camera in hand, standing before topographic and cultural muses.  Kerik has said of his travels:

“Travel has greatly enriched my life and my understanding of the people who share the planet with us.  I am often humbled by how their life experience is so different than mine.  I crave experiences like these and attempt to capture them to the best of my abilities as photographs.”

Regardless of how far we roam, this Earth can be both arresting and comforting – and we should take neither for granted.  We should be awestruck, inspired, caring, and humbled that we are here now in this moment, and work to communicate our unique experiences – that are just as much a whole chapter in the compendium of Earth.  And as Ansel insinuates, photographs will help us get there.  Where are we going?  Kerik’s work resonates with a firm, “somewhere together.”