Unsettled Artifacts

Jill Marie Holslin

May 13 – June 20, 2026

About the Exhibition

The works in Unsettled Artifacts record my process of unpacking and coming to terms with the potent personal memories and collective histories embedded in my family archives from rural Minnesota. My practice brings family archival documents into conversation with my photographs from Dakota and Ojibwe lands in Minnesota to unsettle the certainties of archives and open up new ways to imagine relational histories of land and people.

My family no longer owns the land of my grandparents in Minnesota. But I am the custodian of my grandfather’s family photographs, farmland deeds, plat maps, and documents that speak to a history that made that land legible as property, inheritance, and individual belonging and that eliminated our understanding of Indigenous collective relation to that land. That’s why these documents can exert such a pull on us. They don’t just say who owned land—they say who was authorized to belong, and under what conditions. By placing my family archive within a wider Indigenous geography and history that exceeds it, my work explores the ways settler memory is always situated within Indigenous land, even when it refuses to recognize that fact.

I use the techniques of weaving–of photos and documents—to unsettle the certainties that legal documents and photographs present. I work with fine art photo paper, transparent film, and milky, partially opaque mylar to create conflicting layers. I think of these pieces as a kind of counter-document, where I enact an interruption within a document itself that allows a sense of the organic, of embodied land use, to disrupt the rational map grid.

This moment of deep conflict in the US inspires me to return to the archive, to use the past to produce a more nuanced history of the present. I invite my audience to think about how land and belonging are subject to those who make meaning, and with what materials and ruptures new stories can be told.

See our YouTube channel for more content about our exhibitions.

Learn more about the lecture Jill Marie Holslin is giving on May 23: “Unsettling the Archive: Reweaving the Stories We Inherit.”

Artist’s Statement

As a transborder artist, I gather together fragments from my everyday life, from archives and photographs, trying to give shape to an existence of constant movement. My life on the international border between Mexico and the United States creates constant ruptures in my everyday normality. Always crossing between a “here” and a “there.” Aquí se habla español then to English, and then back to Spanish again. These kinds of misalignments shake us, and our perception begins to change.

In my practice, I cross back and forth between digital and analog, using the digital — camera, scanner, and printer — along with the analog — fine art papers, X-Acto knife, and cutting mat — as my creative tools. I seek out friction and disjunction to challenge our conventional ways of thinking about place, belonging, and memory. I make photographs outdoors in the landscape and bring them together with print artifacts and archival photos. In my studio I print, cut, and restage my materials to create constructed photographs, artist books, and video works in which I make my hand and body visible, active agents in my compositions, holding and arranging archival materials, documents, and maps. My gestures remind me that the archive is not simply a record of the past, but a site to imagine new futures.

By layering materials, my pieces index multiple temporalities and places, destabilizing the perception of a fixed, stable reality in the photograph or the archive. I invite my audience to experience a little bit of friction, a misalignment between what they expect and what they see. To experience the recoding of meaning. To think about how land and belonging are subject to those who make meaning, and with what materials and ruptures new stories can be told.

About the Artist