Landscape is not just a place—it is a space where action, art, and connection to nature intersect. Scapes brings together a group of artists who consider the landscape in their practices, each bringing timely as well as metaphorical additions to this venerated genre.
Offering a blend of abstract interpretations and critical reflections on the environment, the works in Scapes range from dreamlike, otherworldly realms, to stark examinations of the natural world. The exhibition entices viewers to reflect on their relationship with the landscape while considering inherent environmental issues, transformation, psychology, and the constructed spaces that only exist through mediums like painting. Challenging the boundaries between representation and abstraction, Scapes reveals how the artists' approaches to landscape shift as they address different issues, such as the human impact on the land, the alteration of ecosystems, and the beauty and horror that nature holds.
In his solo exhibition Dispersion Field (2023), Brennen Steines distilled multiple meanings of the “field”, as it relates to physics, landscape, and the history of painting. “Matter speaks,” said Steines, “it speaks through the elemental interactions of density, flow, and resistance; acted upon by the forces of gravity, time, and motion. New forms rise and fall; coalesce and disperse, from chaos to order and back again. The landscape discloses the traces of this history.” His paintings in Scapes continue this dialogue, harnessing abstraction and geological materials to highlight how our perceptions and understanding of time are rarely in sync with nature.
Also drawing on a series first exhibited at DIMIN, the bucolic landscapes of Emily Coan hide a darker tale. Inspired by the lineage of women as storytellers, particularly the weavers of myth and literature, Coan employs traditional figuration to build her story of quests, struggle, and triumph. According to Coan, what before was golden and earthy—an experience of conscious participation with community, nature, and creation by the light of the sun—will fade into night.
In the wake of the destructive fires in Los Angeles, the Californian wildfire scenes of Greg Lindquist tender a particularly timely and salient review on themes of climate change, preservation, and the natural world's vulnerability. Growing out of his earlier work examining landscape as a memorial and monument to the past, these paintings of the present climate whiplash capture the elemental force of fire within densely-layered surfaces of metallic, iridescent, and chromatic glazes. On the other end of the spectrum, Sarah Andersen’s cool and ghostly depictions of icebergs offer another atypical landscape depiction, and somber reminder of a very different result of the Anthropocene. Together these works recall the Robert Frost poem Fire and Ice in which the poet speculates on the cause of the end of the world, highlighting humanity’s propensity for self-destruction. To borrow a line: “I hold with those who favor fire”.
