CURRENT EXHIBITION

On Broken Ground

Hannah Smith Allen

BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York proudly announces On Broken Ground, a selection of lens-based works by BAXTER ST 2025 Mid Career Recipient Hannah Smith Allen. This presentation of landscapes from the U.S.-Mexico border interrogates the terrain as a site where digital mediation, national mythology, and physical infrastructure converge, and will be on view from April 16, 2026 to June 3, 2026.

On Broken Ground includes a selection of still photographs, unique screen prints, collage, and a video installation shown alongside Borderlands, an accordion book published by Visual Studies Workshop Press in 2021. Spanning recent works along with those made during Donald Trump’s first presidency, the exhibition explores the American landscape as a site of both possibility and imposed limitations.

This project originated in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, when Allen began studying Google Earth to examine the wall separating California from Mexico. Throughout her searches, she noticed that glitches in the mapping software produced digital distortions in the border wall’s structure. These anomalies appeared as if the wall were opening up or breaking apart and became powerful metaphors for the fragility of the border and the narratives through which the United States constructs its history. After discovering these anomalies, Allen decided to make three physical trips to the U.S.–Mexico border to photograph the landscape firsthand.

Most recently, Allen created a new series of collages that combines screen prints and original photographs in a technique that echoes the flat, patchwork panels of the border wall and renders the American terrain fractured and obstructed; landscapes rupture and split, not only by way of physical barriers but through the weight of their symbolic charge. In dialogue with her collaged landscapes, several new screen prints juxtapose the border landscape with imagery from President Trump’s 250th Anniversary military parade, showcasing the underlying tension between the pageantry of power and the stillness of the desert.

The exhibition will also feature a new iteration of Allen’s video installation, Dream States, which she originally exhibited in 2025. In this version, stop-motion animations that the artist originally captured via Google Earth are projected onto target stands and newspaper clippings. These hallucinatory sequences depict the sky between the United States and Mexico alongside digital revelations of a broken border wall.

While Allen’s work presents a vision of stark boundaries, it also gestures toward the possibility of disruption and transformation. The concrete and steel that mark the landscape are not immutable but malleable, impermanent structures, their authority contingent and fragile. Through Allen’s lens, the border becomes less a fixed line than a site of tension, possibility, and flux, as viewers are invited to reconsider what is divided, what can be repaired, and what might yet shift.

About Hannah Smith Allen
Hannah Smith Allen works across photography, text, printmaking, book arts, and moving images to explore how American history and lore shape the American landscape and its people, both individually and collectively. Central to her practice is a fascination with image materiality: the pixels, ink, Ben-Day dots, and paper that contribute to visual history and meaning.

Allen has received significant recognition for her work, including the 2007 Individual Photographer’s Fellowship from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, a 2010 Artist Fellowship in Photography from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a 2011 A.I.M. Fellowship at the Bronx Museum of Art, and a 2013 Fellowship at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. She has completed residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop and the Vermont Studio Center, and her work has been exhibited at venues across the United States, including the Phoenix Art Museum, Wave Hill Cultural Center, and SF Camerawork. In addition to her studio practice, Allen has written on contemporary photography, with essays appearing in American Photo and Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism.

About BAXTER ST
Founded in 1884, BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York is one of New York City’s oldest artist-run nonprofit spaces committed to lens-based arts. Today, the organization is a socially engaged art incubator that prepares lens-based artists for their debut and helps them create sustainable practices to move forward with integrity. In addition to a year-round exhibition schedule, the organization hosts artist residencies, critique groups, and a public series of artist talks and workshops. Baxter St promotes artists of all ages, races, ethnicities, and identities whose work connects with global conversations on culture, human rights, environment, and equality. The organization is committed to uplifting artists by sharing ideas and resources and learning together to create profound and lasting change in our organization and communities.