Community Garden brings together photographs and film to explore food equity, solidarity, and restorative approaches to landscape. These issues were drawn into sharp focus by this spring’s racially motivated mass-shooting at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, the artist’s home city. Monakhov Stockton’s photographs from Buffalo continue her project to contextualize the city’s divisions through an exploration of its social topography.
This group of images helps situate this store’s significance for the Black community as a valuable resource in a city where high-quality affordable food options often map along racial lines, and where new farms and gardens owned and operated by members of Black, immigrant, and refugee communities highlight growth and resistance. The photographs were created between 2017 and 2022, on 35mm and 4x5 film, and printed digitally in 2022.
Monakhov Stockton, who was born in the Soviet Union, makes work which engages ecology, science, and the landscapes of colonialism through collaborative, documentary, and experimental practices.