Colton Rothwell
Vacant Room
Feb 6 - Mar 1, 2025
In this series, titled Pearl Road, I draw upon memory to examine my relationship with the cultural and physical landscapes of my youth. I was raised in a town of 700 in Idaho and felt like an outsider after acknowledging I was gay in my early adolescence.
During these formative teenage years, I was faced with a choice: to conform to the traditional masculine values of the Western United States – defined by extraction and violence – or to create my own sense of belonging. It is through this struggle that my relationship with the idea of place emerges and I question the persistence of the mythological West. The landscape provided both solitude and escape when I was with lovers, but also heightened our sense of exposure and vulnerability. This tension between ecstasy and fear is what shaped my image-making during this project.
Inspired by the structure of post-documentary approaches by photographers in the 2000s and the impulses and aesthetics of New Topographics photographers working in the 1970s, my project uses personal narrative to resurrect and reimagine these histories.
This work began at the age of 19 after coming out the year before. Years later, I now see that the work not only explores charged memories but is also an exercise in self-discovery through looking. In this poetic form, the images depart from ideas of ‘photographic truth’, capturing the ambiguity of memory and experience. This approach best expresses my ongoing relationship with the landscapes of my youth – unfixed, complicated, and ever-evolving.
Special thanks to Adam DeSorbo for production support and framing.
In-Person Artist Talk
Sat, Feb, 8, 2 PM
Colton Rothwell (American, b.1999, he/him/his) is an artist working in and around photography. His practice draws upon his experiences growing up queer in the rural Western United States to investigate ideas around masculinity, queer ecologies, landscape, and materiality.
He is a recipient of Aperture and Google Pixel’s Creator Lab’s Photo Fund (2023), a Hopper Prize finalist (2023), and was awarded four medals in the 75th College Photographer of the Year Competition (2020). He has exhibited nationally and internationally, and was an artist in residence at the Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta, Canada (2023). His work has been published online and in print, including Booooooom, Aperture, Photo Vogue, Fotofilmic’s JRNL, Shots Magazine, Fraction Magazine, and The Missoulian.
In 2024, he was selected as a finalist in the Top 50 of Photolucida’s Critical Mass, where he was a Michael Reimann grant awardee.
Currently, Rothwell is pursuing an MFA in Visual Arts at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon.