Jamie Robertson’s mushy warmth at Houston Center for Photography, Houston

Jamie Robertson’s photographic research of the wetlands, mushy warmth, epitomizes Toni Morrison’s concept that water has excellent reminiscence.^[1] Robertson’s infrared movie sits towards a lime inexperienced backdrop, making a transtemporal entanglement of swamp previous and current. Her delicate renderings depict dense Southern swamps like Caddo Lake in Texas, Natchitoches in Louisiana, and the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia.

The pictures are thermosensational, inviting viewers into balmy marshes invoking otherworldly realms. Blinding white and black shows of marshland and typical ideograms of varied greens remodel swampy banks into snow-like lightness. Within Robertson’s landscapes lies a distinction. The historically prescribed harshness of marshlands typically depicted in archives from the white settler gaze, an try and tame and conquer, is changed by defiant and visually retold tales.

In Osman within the Swamp (2024) a liberated, previously enslaved particular person, stands amidst tangled undergrowth. In an archival picture, he holds his gun, showing watchful. Robertson reifies Osman’s steadfast militancy. The swamp’s hazy and humid tree canopies unfetter what her digicam sees. Natural websites, considerable with supplies aiding maroon survival, seem particularly within the Great Dismal Swamp. Its tea-colored water is extremely acidic attributable to tannins from juniper,
gum, and cypress bushes, making it remarkably pure. Lush brush obscures sight, creating because the title of 1 picture suggests, A Place To Steal Oneself Away II (2024).

mushy warmth spans a number of modalities, haunting opacities evoke each ghostly apparitions and tranquility. The foliage of bushes leaves traces and blurs. Lines resembling photo voltaic flares in pictures like Spirited Away (2024) create a barely perceptible movement. This presence invitations questions on what inhabits the panorama. If, as Glissant says, “Maroonage was an alliance between the hills and woods with a fellow in search of freedom,” then perhaps the specter in Jamie’s pictures is that seek for liberation – nonetheless unrealized.^[2]

The Great Dismal Swamp is now solely 113,000 acres throughout southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, only a fraction of its unique measurement.^[3] In Caddo Lake, picnic benches now seem to drift amongst cypresses and wetlands, blurring the road between land and bathroom. Robertson’s Black Feminist hauntological evaluation reveals how closely regulated park infrastructure is presently disappearing, however the reminiscence of as soon as thriving Black freedom areas
stays. Unrealized liberation is concrete within the sequence’ motion: leaves are mushy and unfocused, bark pushes by way of the picture in textured, deep ridges. This dysfunction of reminiscence runs rogue and untethered by way of the photographs.^[4]

Emitted mild, photo voltaic scale, and spectrum are gateways into Robertson’s critique of Southern swamp misperceptions. Alligatorwatergreen (2024), a zine accompanying the present, options phrase clouds generated from an web survey on swamp perceptions. The pictures type a historiography of the rebel swamp, subverting, illuminating, and dissecting the ruling class’s ecological misrecognition.

mushy warmth adduces specter and spirit. Robertson’s pictures are surrealist. As she writes in her artist assertion for the present, the work is a ‘poetic means of seeing beyond human sight,’ providing the opportunity of realizing self as Black maroon ancestors did, inextricably certain to panorama and survival.

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Soft Heat is on view at the Houston Center for Photography through April 12, 2026.

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