24,000 Nautical Miles…Photos From a Circumnavigation
In the spring of 2014, Monica’s family embarked on a circumnavigation of the world for the 50th anniversary voyage of the University of Virginia’s Semester at Sea program. They embarked from San Diego, California, on the MV Explorer, a floating campus complete with classrooms, a theatre, a library, cafeterias, guest lectures and visiting professors.
Monica’s husband, Robert Brigham, who is the Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College, was a faculty member on the ship teaching classes in Human Rights, Ending Deadly Conflict and International Relations. Her 13-year-old daughter was ship schooled and attended a college class in World Drama.
As a visual artist, the trip afforded Monica the opportunity to work outside of her comfort zone. While travel photos are often used as springboards for conversations about what people saw or where they went, she wanted to find opportunities to encapsulate stories of the people she met and experiences she lived within a single picture frames. Despite being originally trained in painting and having worked for years as a non-objective, abstract painter, she discovered that her artistic vision translated easily into photography. Like her collages and paintings, Monica’s photographs are concerned with space and place. Through her work, no matter the medium, Monica threads together visual records of the places she’s inhabited. In all forms Monica pays close attention to an underlying grid, color interaction, texture and the layering of space.
