Jo Bertini — Deep in Land: Secrets and the Sublime in America's Southwest

The American Southwest, as it exists within the white settler-colonist imagination, is loaded with complex and often contradictory narratives. Its low population density, heat, presumed barrenness, and sheer expanse belie the reality of complex ecologies, topographies, weather systems, and flourishing ancient and modern cultures. Jo Bertini has been courting these contradictions for several decades now, in an enduring love affair with the desert that has seen her traveling extensively throughout arid regions of Australia, Africa, India, Pakistan, China, and America. Her latest exhibition at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery at the Ent Center for the Arts represents the culmination of eight years of knowledge and experience with the landscape of New Mexico, her adopted home. Bertini’s paintings tenderly draw on the dichotomies of the desert; each work becomes an act of devotion towards an environment that is on the edge, in more ways than one.