Virginia Hanusik

MFA Photography

American Paradise

My practice centers on the tension between fragmentation, collapse, and reconstruction, using the built environment as both subject and index of change. Working across photography, moving image, and sculptural intervention, I approach the landscape as a site of slow transformation, often unfolding beyond immediate perception. What appears stable is frequently in quiet reconfiguration. Buildings act as responsive entities, marked by cycles of damage, repair, and anticipation. Through collage and pastiche, I construct layered visual narratives that challenge assumptions about class, value, and visibility. Drawing from archival imagery, personal documentation, and found materials, I rework the aesthetics and lived realities of working-class environments.

For American Paradise, I’m bringing my interest in landscape, extraction, the precarity of certain kinds of landscapes – and the people and families within them - to my own autobiography. In this work I turn to where I grew up in the Hudson River Valley, the people that brought me there, my connection to manual labor, the use of specific materials like sheet metal, and ask: how does what we inherit pass through us?