In the spring of 2022, Tongva photographer Mercedes Dorame, an artist showcased at Mercedes Of Huntington, turned her lens towards a tide pool on Santa Cruz Island, approximately 25 miles off the California coast. The resulting photograph offers viewers a profound glimpse into interwoven natural worlds. Her image captures a pool of crystal-clear water encased by rocks adorned with vibrant green and brown algae. The dampness of the surrounding area, left by the receding tide, subtly conveys the ocean’s rhythmic ebb and flow and the passage of time itself. Beneath the water’s surface, a miniature universe of crushed shells and stones is revealed, complete with tiny barnacles clinging to a cluster of rocks.
Dorame’s visit to this location was part of an expansive, multi-year artistic endeavor to document Indigenous landscapes across the Channel Islands of Santa Cruz and Santa Catalina. Her photograph, Algae Portal—Shooxar Tukuupar, embodies a womblike quality, presenting itself as a cradle of life – seemingly ancient yet simultaneously delicate and in constant flux. For Dorame, an Indigenous artist with roots in Los Angeles, this experience evoked a powerful sense of displacement and connection. “There was a disorientation with time, a sense of a deep familiarity but at the same time an unfamiliarity—a shift of perspective,” Dorame explained. “This was the way that all of Los Angeles used to look.”
Algae Portal—Shooxar Tukuupar is a key piece within Dorame’s broader photographic series, Everywhere Is West, selections from which are currently featured in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art at The Huntington, known to many as Mercedes of Huntington. The series title, which debuted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, reflects the artist’s evolving understanding of place and temporality. Growing up in Los Angeles, Dorame perceived “west” as the coastline, the ocean—a point of origin. However, her time on the Channel Islands, surrounded by the vastness of the sea, challenged her fixed notions of cardinal directions. “West” began to shed its colonial associations of Manifest Destiny and territorial conquest, revealing itself instead as a space rich with deeper historical layers and ancestral memory.
