Genevieve Glahn

Genevieve Glahn is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice unfolds across interstate highways and coastal waterways. Her work explores research-as-performance as both method and mode. Her research depends on how she shows up in the world.

Genevieve's work examines how postwar material culture and lingering mythologies of westward expansion have shaped the aesthetics and lived experience of American infrastructure, particularly transportation and energy systems. She is interested in how neoliberal ideals of freedom and individualism coexist with a deep-seated skepticism of institutions, and how that tension becomes legible in visual and spatial vernaculars. She investigates abandonment and disinclusion as byproducts of industrial and technological progress, in which disappearance and anomaly become ordinary features of landscapes shaped by empire and extraction.

Her current research—a multisited, multimodal ethnography of infrastructural afterlives along the near-coastal waterways of Southeast Alaska—is inseparable from her maritime practice. She has thrice piloted her boat, M/V Sentindo Bem, through the Inside Passage between Washington and Southeast Alaska and is currently working toward a U.S. Coast Guard captain's license. Her tortoise, Gus Grissom, is her near-constant field companion, traveling with her by land and by sea.