Cecilia Paredes Peruvian, b. 1950

Photographed primarily in sites of post-industrial decay, including a derelict Pennsylvania silk mill, Paredes’s Abandon elegizes the marginalized histories of labor and production performed by women and people of color. Paredes finds resonance between these discarded voices and the manufacturing spaces left behind by globalizing business practices, but she is also joined in this recovery effort by yet another, often neglected, female creator: Gaia, or Mother Earth. Besides defining a withdrawal of support or protection, “abandon” can also describe a yielding to natural impulses, a surrender to the Earth that the artist asks us to join her in bearing witness to.