Landscapes is a group exhibition featuring 27 artists whose work deals with ecology and a spirituality grounded in landscape. It seeks to be an incomplete examination of landscapes through a contemporary lens, taking place between V1 Gallery and Eighteen, covering over 350 sqm of space. With reference to Nikolaj Schultz’s 2023 book Land Sickness, the exhibition revolves around what it means to exist in – and therefore exhaust and consume – the natural world. The artists in the exhibition all grapple with this pertinent question. Schultz has contributed two meditations on the environment and climate anxiety for the exhibition, both of which convey the dire physical circumstances of being either human or landscape in the anthropocene. Landscapes explores the wildness and vastness of our internal and external landscapes in light of our current ecological crisis with an eye towards hope.
We are indebted and interconnected to the land in a primal way. Landscapes are sites for numinous experiences, sites that depersonalise and reveal anew. They are entropy, matter, time, energy, topology, mimicry, perception and consciousness. This very power is why the natural world is aggressively mined for resources. The invisible threads of commerce, science, politics and power tether us to wild terrains while glaciers melt and forests are felled at an unprecedented speed. The landscape is important to the history of humans thus the history of art and also for its connection to commerce and climate change.
Many of the works are large, dwarfing the viewer, mimicking the vastness of experiencing a landscape in person. In Mads Hibert’s monumental 280x380 cm work, of a forest and field, one gets lost in the fog, wondering what could lay on the other side. Hilbert’s work is both abstract and figurative, as if you have walked into the midpoint of a story, dissolving perception from presence. Other works are small, demanding its audience’s attention to the specific light, scale and presence of the landscape, referencing far away lands and pinpointing moments in time. Marcus Leslie Singleton’s small series of pared down landscapes with his signature playful brushstrokes are drawn from his time in the Ivory Coast. Singleton captures snapshots of peacefulness, of time and light. The works come together to make a new landscape in the galleries, built by the 27 artists with movement and hope.
The works in Landscapes deal with the dread, awe, interconnectedness and vertigo associated with living on a dying planet. In The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, she describes the sensation of observing the earth: “details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker. This is how the Earth must see itself.” The focal points dissolve and blur, mimicking the act of observing the natural world and of the earth continuing without human observation. They are at once static and variable, still and seemingly unchanging to the human eye and yet full of movement.
Kilde:
V1 Gallery & Eighteen
V1 Gallery & Eighteen
