Landscape:
Theme and Variation

Exhibition Statement

In the rapidly evolving world, the term “landscape,” while still associated with receding memories of pastoral and bucolic vistas, has undergone significant changes; the ideas and images defining it are no longer what they used to be.

In her book “As Eve Said to the Serpent”, essayist Rebecca Solnit states: “The relationship between ourselves and the land is the principal battlefield of our time.” “The word landscape itself is problematic” . . . “Landscape is scenery, scenery is state decoration and stage décor is static backdrop for human drama.” “In making landscape art, many artists (currently mining the field,) recognize landscape not as scenery but as space and systems we depend on.”

Due to the global impact of environmental changes brought about by industrialization, the depletion of natural resources and its resulting ecological disruptions as well as problems associated with overpopulation, the land and landscape are under siege.

In Solnit’s estimation “we often forget that battlefields are one kind of landscape and that most landscapes are also territories. That is to say that they have political as well as aesthetic dimensions . . . and that art portrays nature and landscape not just where we picnic but also where we live and die. It is where our food, water, fuel and minerals come from where our nuclear waste and s— and garbage go to. It is the territory of dreams, somebody’s homeland and somebody’s gold mine.”

This exhibition presented a range of views held by artists whose ideas reflect their relationship to landscape. Some still cling to an interest in the purely visual stimuli they receive from nature, others reflect on ways in which we have affected nature or ways in which it has affected us. Many comment on the results of human interactions with nature as they explore the encounters between nature, technology and culture. While some works are inspired by nature, others reveal mans increasingly eroding relationship to it.

-Josine Ianco Starrels, Curator
Schneider Museum of Art

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