PROJECT & INSTALLATION PORTFOLIO

Site-Specific Photography & Creative Inquiry

‘Queer Belonging’ Installation

Gallery Route One, Point Reyes, CA, October 30 - December 5, 2021

Queer Belonging: Twenty Four Perspectives was installed in the Center Gallery at Gallery Route One, in downtown Point Reyes Station. The installation featured twenty one portraits of twenty four individuals, some photographed solo and some photographed as couples. Each portrait was accompanied by four environmental images of the location, chosen by the subject, and QR-code accessed audio interviews, sharing the subject’s thoughts on the intersection of place, sexuality, and belonging. The audio also immerses viewers into the environment with sounds of the landscape and season inseparable from the voices and stories.

Queer Belonging

Photos by Shannon O’Neill Creighton, 2021

Twenty-Four individuals between California and Appalachia (Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee) choose a place of significance that offers a personal, felt-sense of belonging to be photographed within. While visiting this chosen location, participants engage in a dialog that explore the intersection of identity, place, and belonging. The choice of location between California and Appalachia explores the constructed paradox of these geographies and how they exist as cultural imaginary symbols of "freedom" and "oppression" while seeking to disrupt and complicate these stereotypes. Queer place-making can happen anywhere and these photographs and stories bring forth the unseen experiences that are held by the landscape to offer counter narratives to the hegemony of heteronormativity and gender conformity. Read the full project statement here.

Photographs and in-depth interviews exhibited at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes, CA October 30th-December 5th, 2021

‘Being Human Now’ Installation

Gallery Route One, Point Reyes, CA May 28-July 11, 2021

A collection of images from the San Pablo Bay Tidal Wetland project were installed at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station, CA as a part of the members show titled, Being Human Now. The exhibit embraces the human need for discerning the path to personal and societal awareness; while exploring our global context in the environmentally challenged world which we have created. Within this theme, the exhibit features a diverse variety of artwork by the gallery's twenty artist members whose innovative pieces have been executed across a wide spectrum of media: artists' books, drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, mixed media, and sculpture. Images were mounted and framed in handmade reclaimed Redwood frames. Images were printed by Point Reyes Printworks.

San Pablo Bay Tidal Wetland

Photos by Shannon O’Neill Creighton, 2019.

The San Pablo Bay, connected to the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, Suisun Bay, and the Pacific Ocean, is comprised of five primary watersheds: Napa River, Sonoma Creek, Sulphur Springs Creek, Petaluma River, Southampton Bay, and Tolay Creek. The landscape of a tidal and seasonal wetlands is home to thousands of shorebirds and waterfowl, & fish species, invertebrates, the endemic Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse, and endangered Ridgeway’s Rail. In the late 1700s Spanish settlers displaced Native Miwok villages, leading to the wetland’s eventual drainage for agricultural use, drying and sinking the land. After several years of seasonal flooding, the agricultural efforts were abandoned and in 2015 the levee was breached, beginning the long arc of restoration. In the summer of 2019, I documented a native grass transplanting effort to counter erosion along the San Pablo Bay shoreline.

‘(Un)Seen Lands’ Installation

Green Valley Farm + Mill, Sebastopol, CA, April - May 2018

(Un)Seen Lands was installed in a turn-of-the-century logging barn at Green Valley Farm + Mill in Sebastopol, California. The barn was cabled and images were suspended in mid-air to give the appearance that they were floating. Images were accompanied by excerpts from the book’s essays. The photographs served to create dividers in the space, creating individual viewing rooms, where the text and images existed in relationship to each other. Each image was framed with handmade top and bottom, scroll-style bars. All aspects of installation were done by the artist, with the help of her father. Fine art prints by Skylark Images in Sebastopol.

(Un)Seen Lands: The Texture of Intimacy

Photos & Essays by Shannon O’Neill Creighton, 2018

Through a journey along her homeland of coastal Northern California, returning to places that first evoked her sense of imagination, trust, and self-reliance, Shannon set out to collaborate with her lived experience. Using the lens of phenomenology, she engages the sensory body, observation, and memory as a means to examine the paradox of modernity and wisdom. Attending closely to the way perception is inherently subjective, Shannon asks the question of how what we see mirrors what we attend to. The resulting body of work uncovers an inconsolable longing for connection amidst a perpetual state of change and transition.

Through her collection of large-format photographs and lyrical-narrative essays, she calls upon the textures of beauty and loss, intrinsically intertwined, to speak through the terrain. Read the full project statement here.

This body of work resulted in the culmination of a book of short essays and images and was installed at Green Valley Farm + Mill for an opening. For more on the installation, please see below.

For full book access click here (password protected)