ideas of nature :: drawing exhibition :: 2022

This two-dimensional, digital print drawing is based on a Hudson River School landscape painting by Thomas Cole (Lake with Dead Trees, 1825) and a landscape photograph by Edward Burtynsky (Lithium Mines #1, 2017). Combining these two different visions of ‘land’ in a single-point perspective grid, the drawing is a meditation on how landscapes visualized through particular representational and cultural lenses produce correspondingly different ideas about nature.

Hudson River School paintings were made primarily by and for American urban dwellers in the early to mid-nineteenth century. They generally represent American landscapes as vast, powerful, sometimes dangerous, and untouched by humans. These qualities are often enhanced by removing existing signs of human inhabitation; moving, altering, or combining landscape elements; and/or placing point-of-view in a precarious position. In these paintings, nature is represented as an endless sublime wilderness that can be controlled through the totalizing vision of the painter (or in turn, humanity).

Edward Burtynsky’s photographs also represent landscapes as vast, powerful, and sometimes dangerous, but clearly intervened upon by humans. Human intervention on land is alternately seen as seductive and terrifying. Burtynsky is purposeful in maintaining this dissonant ambiguity. His photographs interrogate human activity in the material world: Are we prepared to accept the negative consequences of lithium mining on one ecosystem to continue growing another ecosystem dependent on battery power? Nature is not represented as a pristine wilderness, but a realm where human activity is inevitable.

By combining these two visions of landscape, and the ideas of nature they represent, the drawing offers a new formation of land related to, but somewhat divergent from the ‘Artificial Earths’ thematic. Rather than a post-natural landscape in the sense that anthropogenic constructs might be mistaken for ‘natural’, it is a multi-natural landscape that overlays different views of what nature could be or should be. The single-point perspective grid reveals the construct of the drawing, and within this human-centric geometry, the drawing suggests nature is a socio-political idea separate from the material world. There is more than one idea of nature. Investing in one has profound impact on the material world and stewardship of the planet.