MOVING ALONG NARROW CANYON
SKIING WITH YUCCA
ARTIST STATEMENT (AKA WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT)
This work is motivated by thinking about the way land is portrayed through art and investigating a new way of representing it. The separation between man and nature is deeply ingrained in western society with the way we have historically viewed nature being from a standpoint of human benefit and development. Our everyday lives are shaped by this mindset, as we live indoors then drive on paved roads to the next indoors, have water at the turn of a knob, buy food without connection to where it’s grown, and send the trash we produce away without having to think or look at where it will sit and outlive us.
The Hudson river school of the mid 19th century marks the popularization of landscape painting—before the 1820’s landscape was not a genre of painting the way it is today. Paintings from artists of this movement such as Thomas Cole, Durand, and Bierstadt exemplify this detached romantic view of nature. Their works were used to commodify the land to congress and are tied to the tradition of national parks and problematic history of westward expansion. These landscape paintings left out the communities of native people inhabiting the spaces and presented a view of the west as virgin nature and a place for man to conquer or admire as “visitors”—rather than live in conjunction with. The genre of landscape painting following in this tradition consists of selecting a framed view that shows a “scene” of the land and illustrating that view. What I am curious about is how can art grant agency to land?
The goal of my work is to bring the viewer into the space rather than show them an illustration of it, and to convey the land subjectively— not as something passive that can be objectified and used for our benefit but as something that exists for its own sake. These pieces are not objective illustrations, but are portraits of real places and plants created through connection and memory.