Landscape: Real and Imagined
Nov 16, 2018 – Dec 15, 2018
Annie Varnot, PCT: Washington Sun Flares and Fire
Artistic rendering of landscape is not the passive accumulation of naturalist detail, but an active operation: it is of this world as well as in it. Land (natural, biological, and manmade forms) is aesthetically processed — idealized, deconstructed, abstracted, sanctified — and turned into landscape. The critic W. J. T. Mitchell argued that landscape is not so much a genre as a “medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other.”
If landscape is a medium of exchange, what is being exchanged? This show, presenting 48 artists, working across painting, photography, and print, as well as the intersections of multimedia, answers this question in a variety of ways. Many artists update the legacy of the avant-garde, using abstraction, collage, and other means of dislocation to force viewers to reconsider what they take to be natural. Others stake a more classic position, seeking out the Renaissance ideal of “amenity” or the sensory pleasure of well-ordered nature, which carries its own implications in our increasingly hyperreal and synthetic world. And still others move away from the two dimensional, bringing painting and sculpture into direct conversation. However, what they all share is succinctly captured in Wallace Steven’s “Anecdeote of the Jar,”
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird of bush.
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
The slight intervention of the jar transforms and then dominates unruly, nature, everything takes a point in relation to it. This show explores that ongoing relation.
About the Juror:
Eileen Jeng Lynch is the Curator of Visual Arts at Wave Hill New York Public Garden and Culture Center. She curates the Sunroom Project Space for emerging artists and is involved in all aspects of visual arts programming, including exhibitions in Glyndor Gallery, publications, and the annual Winter Workspace program. As an independent curator, Jeng Lynch organized exhibitions that featured emerging and established contemporary artists in galleries and nonprofit institutions, including Sperone Westwater, Lesley Heller Gallery, Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, and Radiator Gallery and worked at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has contributed to Two Coats of Paint and On-Verge.
Artists:
Aaliyah Gupta, Aaron Asis, Bailey Arend, Ann Cofta, Ann Marie Auricchio, Annie Varnot, Athena LaTocha, Beth Ganz, Bill Burgess, Christine Aaron, Claudine Metrick, Elizabeth Gargas, Françoise Soulé Zinsou Duressé, Hannah U, Jen Noone, Jessie Novik, Jolene Powell, Joomi Chung, Katie M. Westmoreland, Kayo Albert, Marcelyn Bennett Carpenter, Maria Ossandon Recart, Marianne Barcellona, Mark Granlund, Matthew Arnold, Meridith McNeal, Nathan Taves, Patty Cateura, Rebecca Schultz, Rosalyn Bodycomb, Kim Carlino, Russell Horton, Ruth Jeyaveeran, Scott Bae, Scott Groeniger, Seungkyung Oh, Sophia Lee, Soulaf Abas, Stefan Hagen, Timothy Clifford, Whitney Sage, Yasemin Kackar- Demirel, Zachary Skinner