The Culture of Landscape

The Culture of Landscape explores the dichotomies, myths, and symbols of our cultural and natural environment. The project mediates on how our construct of the landscape, from notions of the banal, the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime to historic, psychological, and technological arrangement of commerce and industry, defines our civilization and shapes our identity. The images concentrate on the marks of culture - consumption, labor, leisure, production, and semantics - as forces that transform nature. The project also deals with cultural tourism by depicting the ways that people attempt to control and manipulate nature. The subject is as much about human intervention as it is place, substantiating how people model the landscape and how lives are affected by it. It shows that the landscape is a complex, multi-layered human creation that reveals the complex interdependence between the natural world and its human occupants.

The group is highly diversified in terms of approach, background, and process with their common ground being that all the artists use photo-based images to formulate new associations and meaning about our cultural landscape. Artists are Greg Erf, Robert Hirsch, Keith Johnson, James Nakagawa, Ron Tarver, Brian Taylor, Maggie Taylor and Anna Ullrich.

Below is a small sample of the work in this exhibition.

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