Splendor

It took Courtney Allen more than half a decade and thousands of miles of travel across a dozen states to capture the photos that compose his first monograph, Splendor. As the title indicates, the American landscape is undeniably one of glory and grandeur. "If we can understand the capacity of beauty in any situation, it's there," she said. "It's a primary experience and universal. In these photographs, the built environment, almost inescapable, complicates and confounds our various expectations of nature: to be fed, conquer, stand, be held. Allen's meditative meanderings in the natural world are punctuated by moments when things seem not to be to be in their place, as if one had been awakened from a dreamlike state. "find inside a picture of Courtney Allen," observes Kathleen Alcott. in his essay, “it is to listen to a debate between the secular and the divine, the sensible and the fabricated, the eternal and the recent”. It is important to note that These tensions are not simply described by Allen, but rather evoked, because we see things not only through his eyes, but also as a collective experience, an act of community among people who have were also attracted to these sites. Courtney Allen (born 1988) is a photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work focuses on our relationship with the natural world - our hopeful expectations meeting the reality of our contributions. In 2014, she co-founded Magic the Gallery, a project of conservation and art gallery based in Austin, Texas.