AMERICAN LANDSCAPE
Five Myles 558 St. John’s Place, Brooklyn, NY, 11238
Opening Reception November 17th
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence with no civilization in between"
- Oscar Wilde
In the mid 19th century, a group of artists known as the Hudson Valley School sought to capture the magnificence of the American frontier at a time when little of it was seen, and even less was known. It was a precursor to the grand experiment of manifest destiny and glorified the pristine, “virgin” land of this young country as much as it disregarded the history of a civilization who had called it home for thousands of years. These painters corralled their efforts under the cloak of Romanticism, attempting to capture the sublimity of natureʼs prowess under godʼs creation. It was a method of interpreting their surroundings with a child-like innocence, with little regard to sense of place and history, let alone the cultures that inhabited it. While these painters demonstrated a high level of craft and their aesthetic is what the majority of the general public think of when they hear the word “art,” their subject matter is arbitrary and generic, offering the viewer mere surface contemplation; nothing more than the saccharine pleasure of an idealized meadow, river, or mountain.
As the Hudson Valley School proffered idyllic visions of a new countryʼs seemingly endless bounty of open space and natural resources, the group of artists and thinkers in this exhibition are grappling with effects of late model capitalism, after the 20th centuryʼs greatest superpower has reached its peak and begins to tumble down the mountain.
Engaging what Gilles Deleuze would refer to as “nomadic thought,” this exhibition interprets the cycle of people who live on, alter, and leave certain sections of land as an amorphous process with constantly changing boundaries of our physical and psychological environments. Their choice of media reflects this mode of thinking, defining their practices with monikers like “exercises in futility,” “video documentation of temporary public installations,” or “mobile-hybrid sculptural systems”. Their works act of a kind of field guide, offering the viewer multiple routes for navigating their physical and cultural surroundings.
Greg Stewartʼs sculptural works and performative “survival suits” are eerie mutations of man and animal, designed for the kind of harmonious chaos that is spawned from migration and adaptation in the areas in between urban and rural environments. For Dan Carlson the residue and monuments of the Cold War, in the form of abandoned military bases and industrial wastelands, serve as fertile ground for cultivating response in the form of video installations. Peter Lapsleyʼs sculptures are composed of industrial materials used in contemporary architecture that nod to the perfect forms of ancient mathematics and the ruins that serve as evidence of their unattainability. Producing both reflective and functional research-based works, Jan Mun focuses on cultural and conceptual, text-based work uses Gertrude Stein's writing in tandem with the Human environmental remediation through community-based interventions, while Rick Reid's conceptual, text-based work uses Gertrude Stein's writing in tandem with the Human Genome Project and Davinci's Divine Proportion to create a new vision of human cartography. Corina Reynolds examines our ritualistic relationship with high-technology and its power to homogenize any foreign space into something immediately accessible and familiar whereas Josh Bricker's videos create a kind of displacement where the commonplace, nationalist pride so embedded in American entertainment turns into and familiar, whereas Josh Bricker's videos create a kind of displacement where the something completely alien.
John Wanzel employs the method of artist as expert, taking a pseudoscientific approach for describing man-made structures in geologic terms, while Leah Raintree's shale drawings distort value systems of natural resources in abstracted, economic terms. Tom Pnini's videos reveal the mechanics of illusions created using water, earth, and light, and play nicely with Chad Curtis' scaled down mountains made from everyday materials. Ben Finer's works on paper hinge the seemingly mundane beauty of natural landscapes with a constructed spirituality, while Daniel Glendening acts as a kind of intermediary historian, culling inspiration from the failed utopian experiments of our recent past and producing artifacts that seem to come from the near future.
Overall, these artists are united through a heightened sense of awareness to their surroundings and modes of understanding their immediate environments through the lens of the American landscape; a landscape that is shaped through the unseen sociopolitical forces that dominate the constant shift of cultural paradigms and the dizzying flux of construction and destruction.
New works by: Marin Abell, Josh Bricker, Dan Carlson, Chad Curtis, Ben Finer, Daniel Glendening,
Peter Lapsley, Jan Mun, Tom Pnini, Leah Raintree, Rick Reid, Corina Reynolds, Greg Stewart, &
John Wanzel.
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