Brenda Biondo "Unnatural (Tumbleweeds)"

Unnatural (Tumbleweeds), a grid of 20 circular images of tumbleweeds found and photographed outside my studio in Marfa, Texas, provides a slightly disorienting view of this invasive plant. By inverting the colors or otherwise altering the color space of many of the photos, I’ve created unnatural hues that allude to the fact that the plants themselves are an unnatural feature of the American landscape. 

This artwork was motivated by my realization several years ago that tumbleweeds, imprinted on cultural memory through its appearances in classic American Western movies, is actually an invasive species brought inadvertently to the United States in the 1870s by Eastern European settlers. It’s believed that tumbleweed seeds contaminated sacks of flax seeds transported by the settlers, first gaining a toehold in South Dakota. Tumbleweed quickly spread across the country, crowding out native grasses and wildflowers and irrevocably transforming the grasslands of the American West. Each time I hike near my home in Colorado and my secondary studio in Marfa, I see tumbleweeds everywhere – reminding me of the immigrants who traversed America 150 years ago, unknowingly changing the entire biome of the region as they rolled along in covered wagons.