The Invested Landscape show at the Nave Gallery in Somerville, MA is getting installed this weekend. It is a show of a variety of artists who are expressing their relationship with landscape. The following is our curatorial statement.
The artists presented in Invested Landscape wield a wide variety of methods and aesthetics for investigating the human/landscape relationship. For centuries artists have interacted and interpreted the great outdoors, capturing the light in their surrounding village or recording exotic vistas, real or imagined, from distant lands. Recently, this interaction has become more direct, digging up the earth for land art that can only be seen from above. In this exhibit, urban and rural landscapes, both near and far, familiar and unfamiliar, are altered and deconstructed to represent or interpret our relationship with place.
Artist Jane Lincoln abstracts the ever-elusive color and light on the bogs of Provincetown in into vertical signifiers in her paintings. In contrast, Rimas Simaitis constructs a self-contained exploration vehicle and videotapes his exploration of a suddenly alien landscape. Sarah Bliss, in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral collects information through interviews, images and found objects, that helps her define a foreign landscape she encountered during her residency in Cill Rialaig, County Kerry, Ireland. Each artist invests the landscape with a personal interpretation of place and affect. Gathered here is a group of works that deconstruct the understanding of what landscape is. Tivy's postcards, Ransom's pinhole cameras, Johnson's descriptive snippets—they're all landscapes, but put through a diffracting lens.
Katie Jurkiewicz, Nancy Winship Milliken, Ted Ollier
