Among the most recognizable forms of art for many, landscape paintings in their simplest form are efforts to capture and represent the natural world around us on canvas or other mediums. The beauty of our natural surroundings offers both a comfort based on our own experiences and yet provides a wide range of subject possibilities including mountains, valleys, hills, rivers, forests, and the coastline and other familiar natural settings.
Today, landscapes seem to be everywhere, whether in the form of screens, idealized photographs, commemorative calendars, motivational posters, or pinging Twitter and Instagram feeds. The default desktop wallpaper on nearly every operating system has become a landscape, as if to showcase the superiority of technology in its ability to faithfully render nature in millions of pixels per inch.
The simplicity of the common contrast between light and dark within the artwork of Thomas Wheeler is conceptually and aesthetically alluring. At first glance Wheeler’s images are clearly photographs, perfectly precise images taken from nature at night with additional elements lit to create a haunting attractive glow beckoning the viewer closer as they move within the scene until transfixed. Wheeler directly manipulates each scene he captures using additional highlighted items, some which are recognizable like trees or rocks, while the others are reduced to mere shapes as a square or linear line. The artist’s hand is palpable within each composition decision of what remains lit.
Gremzde’s practice explores human and nature relationship regarding nature as a focus for the formation of individual and community’s identity. Growing alienation from nature, habitation in cities and dominating consumer lifestyle results in more time spent in constructed, artificial spaces monitored by surveillance cameras like shopping malls and waiting halls defined as non-places, which being real measure of our time have no identity, relations and history. The scene of nature paid close look at as opposite can open itself to reveal a secret life, a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception.
CMATO is honored to showcase Rebecca Rutstein, a Philadelphia-based artist whose works are based in her interest in technology, geology, maps and the undercurrents that continually shape and reshape the world. Her largescale landscape sculptures and paintings are inspired by from her prestigious residency aboard two scientific naval exploration vessels that traveled the world. From these missions, Rutstein has mined the satellite and sonar data to present the wild, unbounded grandeur of the natural world with a technological sublimity that grasps at the infinite possibilities suggested by computers. Jennifer Li, Art in America contributor, writes in the exhibition catalogue,
