Discover Strange Landscapes at AAC
For thousands of years artists have been depicting the land around them.
Today, artists are still drawn to the subject of the landscape, but with a new, and often critical, lens and purpose. This weekend we will open Strange Landscapes, featuring artists who make work that challenges traditional landscape art.
More than just an illustration of location, the artists in this exhibition consider landscape as a topic, an allegory, and an interpretation of our relationship with the world around us.
Some of the work explores the political and aesthetic qualities of landscape art, while other artists in the exhibition draw viewers into their own worlds, using the landscape as a setting in which to explore overlooked histories and underrepresented points of view.
Strange Landscapes is co-curated by Blair Murphy, independent curator and partner at Field Projects in New York, and Karyn Miller, our own Director of Exhibitions, and will be on view: June 25 – October 2, 2016 with an opening reception: June 25, 6-9 pm
Artists: Matthew Colaizzo, Edgar Endress, Ryan Hoover, Ariel Jackson, Katarina Jerinic, Matthew Mann, Jaimes Mayhew, Alejandro Pintado, Jacob Rivkin, Margarita Sánchez Urdaneta, and Kate Stewart.
Matthew Colaizzo
Matthew Colaizzo creates multi-block woodcut prints, drawing inspiration from quarries, mines, and other sites where the earth has been excavated, moved, and otherwise disrupted by human efforts.
Edgar Endress
Work by Edgar Endress explores the ongoing struggle in the Andes between the forces of nature, the debris of a Spanish colonial system, and its troubled relationship to traditional ways of living for indigenous groups, along with works that expose the scientific dominance over colonized landscapes.
Ryan Hoover
In his Arborescent Algorithms series Ryan Hoover employs a range of media to look at how technology structures our daily lives. This led him to create an algorithm mimicking the growth patterns of trees, resulting in 3D printed sculptures that explore the parallels between digital technology and the processes of nature.
Ariel Jackson
Ariel Jackson is a multi-media artist who creates alternative narratives and science-fiction landscapes for processing sociopolitical traumas. Jackson’s collaged videos and sculptures feature invented landscapes, narratives, and two main characters, Lil Lil and Confuserella.
Katarina Jerinic
Katarina Jerinic’s Beautification This Site centers on a leftover piece of landscape she acquired through the Adopt-A-Highway Program. Part earthwork, part self-assigned residency, Beautification This Site calls attention to the land and way it is shaped by bureaucratic and natural forces, passers-by, and Jerinic’s endless efforts to maintain it.
Matthew Mann
Matthew Mann’s latest series, Twee Brutalism, explores architecture’s power to condition environments and demonstrate civic priorities and communal messaging, drawing on his own experience as a resident of a quickly changing urban landscape.
Jaimes Mayhew
Jaimes Mayhew’s large-scale inflatable sculpture, The Wave of Mutilation, is the centerpiece to the imaginary, utopian community for transgender men who are attracted to transgender men called Samesies Island.
Alejandro Pintado
Alejandro Pintado’s work explores our historical memory of landscape and its transformation over time. He selects pristine landscapes and edits them using contemporary objects and imagery.
Jacob Rivkin
Jacob Rivkin’s work considers and navigates the gaps between the analog and the digital methods of cinema and perception. Filmed on location in Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah and remote cliffs of Salvage, Newfoundland, his film Fortunate Isles: Landings relies on landscape to explore questions of evolution, reality, and wonder.
Margarita Sánchez Urdaneta
Margarita Sánchez Urdaneta’s work examines the way loss and trauma are depicted to either hide or overexpose predetermined historical narrations. Through the analysis and re-articulation of architectural sites, landscapes, testimonies, accounts, and literary fictions she questions the forms of representation that perpetuate these narrations.
Kate Stewart
Kate Stewart depicts the landscape as a common motif, a literal reference, and a symbolic notion. Stewart will install a walnut ink wall-drawing at AAC that references Chinese landscape painting and the feeling of being trapped within a brambly landscape. Coupled with colorful paintings, the landscape is abstracted and perspective shifts to create an uneasy meditation on artifice, reality, and escape in our culture.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.
Also on view at AAC this summer
In the Wyatt Resident Artists Gallery
June 25 – July 31, 2016: Austin Shull: Reconciliation
On the Upper Level, we will present Reconciliation, a solo exhibition by AAC Resident Artist Austin Shull, whose video work in this show explores alternative histories created from multiple narratives that unfold non-sequentially during the excavation of an 18th century stone-lined privy in the backyard of a former tenement building in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A series of photographs, shown in tandem with the video, reveals the collective investigations, interactions, and fantasies of its participants.
Aug 13 – Oct 2, 2016: Light Wishes Only to Be Land,
curated by Becca Kallem, opening reception: Sat, Aug 13, 6 – 9pm
In the language of painting, flatness and depth are usually opposites. Light Wishes Only to Be Land, a group show curated by AAC Resident Artist Becca Kallem features work by Tom Bunnell, Mike Dowley, Liz Guzman, along with Kallem, and presents a variety of approaches to surface and space.
This group of artists share interests in layers and veils, openings and apertures, identities, meanings, and other worlds.
In the Jenkins Community Gallery
June 25 – July 31, 2016: Materialized Magic: Mythical Creatures in a Yarn Artistry Habitat
On the Lower Level, our Jenkins Community Gallery will be transformed into an immersive three dimensional fiber art installation. This exhibition takes yarn bombing to the next level by integrating two individual artist’s visions with a community vision. Featuring the work of Stacy Cantrell and Erika Cleveland Materialized Magic is a collaborative process, sourcing the community for creation, assembly, and installation of woodland, water, and sky habitats for the large-scale mythical fiber creatures.
Aug 12 – Oct 2, 2016: AAC and CHAW Student Exhibition: Photography Institute
In the Jenkins Community Gallery we’ll present the work of teen students from our summer Photography Institute, developed in partnership with Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Students participate in an intensive program that covers historic and contemporary practices of photography from film to digital.
Ultimately, students will work together to mount a group photography exhibition after learning the technical, creative, and curatorial aspects of photography and exhibitions.
