Program Details

Stelo Arts in Portland, OR

January 11th to February 22nd

Open hours Thursday-Saturday 12:00-5:00 PM

I Know This Place by Heart is a visual collection built over eight years of long-distance creative partnership
from duo Ahnika Wood and Karina Rovira. Together, they bring distinct artistic traditions into
dialogue wherein textiles, the body, the camera, and light become shared language.

Early in their collaboration, the pair set out to photograph each other as a way to understand
their connection. Resulting images were experimentally printed, altered manually, torn,
reformatted, melted, and melded in an effort to allow room for both of their subjectivity. This
project, Refraction, produced sharp qualities intended to distort light.

Years later, Wood and Rovira again place themselves both in front of and behind a medium
format film camera, this time further involving each other in decision making. They reference
Diana Block and Marlo Broekmans’ seminal work, Invisible Forces, which the two connected
with in different ways and used as a conversation piece between them. Similarly to Block and
Broekman, Wood and Rovira began positioning themselves as infinitely reflecting mirrors;
upending power dynamics often found in photography and instead using the medium as a way
to be seen and to see each other simultaneously.

As a result, their authorship is merged entirely—hence the use of “m/e” and “m/y” in the final
titles. The titles further reference writer and philosopher Monique Wittig’s Le Corps Lesbien, a
text shared by the artists while guiding silk and cyanotype to interpret the shadowy images they
created. Analogue processes slow down making to allow for conversation and adjustment while
the chosen materiality brings the viewer into the haziness of their internal worlds— as shifting,
hard-to-place figments under the light of the moon or under water.

I Know This Place by Heart follows the evolution of their relationships throughout time,
especially, but not exclusively, the complexity of the artists’ relationship with each other. They
maintain a dyadic process that leaves space for difference, distance, and misunderstanding. As
such, I Know This Place by Heart presents the mirroring nature of intimacy and posits that the
production of selfhood is an ongoing collaboration with others.