Catherine J. Davis

Stretching some 1,600 miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande in Texas to the Florida Everglades, the US Gulf Coast is vast and complex. Buffered by warm, shallow seas, the water’s edge is consistently humid and mild with abundant sunshine and ample precipitation. Land here is naturally flat, rising on average a few dozen feet above the ocean’s surface. The region is an innate patchwork of both natural and built environments, a tangled combination of history and geography, culture and ecology that reflects an intimate and ever-evolving relationship between humans, land and sea.

The Third Coast explores this distinct vernacular landscape: newly-built houses rising like monoliths above the tides, industrial pipelines subsumed by muddy water, palm trees as stylized icons, and fiberglass sharks marking toothless tourist displays. Thematically, these photographs investigate the liminal spaces along the ocean’s edge, where the highly constructed experience of the shore begins to breakdown. Tonally, they reflect places caught in the endless process of development and dissolution. More than just describing the topography however, this body of work explores the Gulf Coast's visual vocabulary, it’s sense of place, and the recurrent themes that together create the area's distinct material and cultural identity.