Exhibition Review - Like Hills Made of Sand
Published July 3rd 2025
By Montenez Lowery
Image courtesy of the artist and Atlanta Center for Photography
There's a particular dread in driving an hour into Atlanta, searching for resonance in art, and leaving empty-handed. But when I parked my car at ACP's newest show, Like Hills Made of Sand, that dread quieted. Brayan Enriquez's solo debut—part of Atlanta Center for Photography's Emerging Artist Fellowship—offered excitement for something I hadn't felt since The High's Truth Told Slant.
And still, I paused after reading a recent review, not because it offered a different reading but because it asked for something Brayan never claimed to give. Something louder. A scream. A rebellion. It was looking for the kind of fire we've come to expect when brown hands hold a camera, when proximity to injustice becomes currency. And maybe that's what unsettled me: how easily we crave the spectacle of pain, how quickly we mistake quiet for absence, clarity amongst complexity. What does it mean to want revolt in every frame when sometimes all a person chooses to offer is stillness shaped by survival?
Brayan's earlier work has often leaned toward the analytical, where distance felt incidental, as though he were an outsider looking into a window rather than a participant looking into a mirror. But in Like Hills Made of Sand, he turns that gulf into an intention —a strategy to explore what connection might look like across generations, countries, and memory. His black-and-white photographs vary in size, surface, and approach, differences that were criticized but struck me as a strength.
Rather than signaling thematic confusion, the layered metaphors of water, traditional portraiture, sand, and family archives invite us into a narrative shaped by fragmentation… the very texture of diasporic memory.
Water, here, speaks in multiple tongues. The prelude, migration, and memory. It's almost as though I feel its weight, like an enchanting threat. A diptych of thick, ominous water, and diagonal from it, My mother's collage that hangs in my grandmother's room after Hurricane Otis. The placement feels deliberate as both are placed at either entrance. A reminder that the struggle doesn't end in arrival, the water just learns a new shape. But I still stood there wondering what water could mean for Brayan. Then I realized, to me, it is distance.
Nowhere is this sense of distance more palpable than in Las Primas. Two girls sit in plastic chairs, their bodies and shadows obscuring the patterned light reflected off the tiled floor. One slouches, foot tucked into the chair, already bored with you. The other stares firmly, already naming your trespass.
It's a look I recognize, not one of hostility but of clarity. As she confronts me, I question how one's relationship to the concept of family changes as a second-generation immigrant. Does every lingering gaze from familial ties, unknown, cause you to retreat into your body like I did viewing this photo? To be conscious of what is not there while constantly reminded of what should be.
Then, I turned around and met the gaze of Brayan's grandmother. Seated on a set of steps, bathed in soft backlight, the shadow and light dancing across her body and the scene as though they were the subjects. This beautiful mural, easy to miss depending on where you enter, embraces you. She looks at me directly, not with joy or excitement, nor this confrontation I found in Las Primas, but with familiarity. A gaze that I found comfort in; ironic that these two photos sit opposite one another with me in the middle, feeling the pressure of Las Primas at my back as I am swallowed by what I can only describe as a much-needed reprieve.
Image courtesy of the artist and Atlanta Center for Photography
Lastly, Brayan incorporates archival photographs, another choice that was critiqued. But rather than presenting them front-facing, he flips them over, revealing only their backs, sometimes with smaller images embedded, in a passport-style format. What we see is evidence of time: ink bleeding through, curling edges, the warping of paper that's been handled, stored, passed on. These images become abstracted, hidden. We're left to imagine what is on its face: a need to consume. It's a gesture that resists full access and quietly insists this isn't for you. Or maybe this isn't entirely for Brayan, either.
In the review I'm responding to, this strategy is read as another departure from the exhibition's core themes—another vernacular, departure into the territory of memory and the archive rather than "transience and immigration." But that reading misunderstands the deeply interwoven relationship between memory and migration.
What is immigration, if not a rupture in memory? What happens when the place that shaped your sense of self becomes inaccessible? You hold onto fragments. You pass on what you can, shaped by erosion. You try to teach your children a world that no longer surrounds them. The customs are not in the air, not in the sand beneath their feet—they're in you. In your stories. In your attempts to conjure, to translate.
To suggest that Enriquez's archival gestures are unrelated to "transience" is to overlook how migration reshapes memory and how the archive itself becomes a vital survival tool. The backs of these photographs speak to the ambiguity and disorientation of inheritance: what you're told, what you're shown, and what inevitably fades.
There's also a noticeable quietness in the show, at times, it reads less like reverence and more like reluctance…a hesitation to take up space and exist within the histories he's circling. It's an odd tension: a documentarian whose gaze is fixed on the intimate yet who never quite enters the frame himself. The result is a body of work that points to connection but sometimes stops short of vulnerability. One wonders if the distance he maintains is about honoring the subject or protecting himself from it, if this is even a conscious choice. I found myself wanting to feel desire, the effort to connect across the gap, not just observe it. Brayan's feelings are beautifully rendered, but what about the ache that precedes it? The attempt that falls short?
Image courtesy of the artist and Atlanta Center for Photography
The work isn't trying to explain migration to you. It's not a lecture, not a protest sign. It's a feeling — slippery, partial, shaped by the quiet labor of holding on while letting go. To ask this show for coherence is to ask it to lie. It speaks in fragments because that's the only honest language it has.
And maybe that's what unsettles some viewers — the politics aren't in the shouting. They're buried in the gesture, in the pause. In the way, Brayan flips the photo to its back, refusing to let us see what we're used to consuming. These aren't images made for proof or performance. They're for remembering and sometimes forgetting. In a moment when we've come to expect immigrant stories to bleed in high definition, this work whispers. It says: here is the ritual, here is the archive, here is a gaze that won't explain itself to you.
Like Hills Made of Sand is a beautiful and intimate beginning to the exploration of the way migration impacts familial relationships. In a way, this show feels like a falling action —a natural result after the climax, where the weight of the past settles quietly in the present. When I left, the show gave me a way to sit with distance, to trace the edges of something too large and tender to hold in a single frame, and that, too, is a kind of love. A type of love I was reminded of in my own life as I drove back home.
Like Hills Made of Sand will run at the Atlanta Center for Photography through August 23rd. Review their website for more info.
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Montenez Lowery is a multidisciplinary Black American artist working in Atlanta, GA. Utilizing pinhole photography to explore identity, cultural memory, and the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Lowery is interested in photographic material and process and how they can be incorporated to enrich the themes he tackles. Lowery has earned a BFA in Photography from the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University. He was awarded The Larry and Gwen Walker Award and shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards Student Competition.
Brayan Enriquez (b. 2000) is a first-generation Mexican-American artist based in Atlanta, GA. His work focuses on his family and their past as undocumented immigrants to discuss the migrant experience in the United States. Enriquez earned a BFA in Photography from the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University. He’s a recipient of Atlanta Center for Photography’s 2025 Emerging Artist Fellowship and Aperture and Google’s 2024 Creator Labs Photo Fund. His work has been featured in The AJC, ArtsATL, The New York Times, and LENSCRATCH, and he was included on a panel at the inaugural Atlanta Art Fair.