Hilary Baldwin
Jason Bartsch
Brian Burkhardt
Evelyn Rydz
Jamie Vasta
Lauren Warner

"Yellowstone I" Lauren Warner

"Pop, Squish, Drip, Splash" Evelyn Rydz

Blurring Landscape
Curated by Evelyn Rydz

Sept. 10 - Oct 22 2004
Opening: Sept. 10 5-8pm

Blurring Landscape offers a look at landscape as a place that is both blurred and in the process of being blurred, a fluid and changing site composed of interconnected dynamic forces. Where does one landscape begin and another end? Where, how, and in what form can nature be located within a landscape? An endless multitude of layered and linked landscapes exist simultaneously, each one affecting its inhabitant’s lives and creating a boundless variety of possibilities and problems for how a given landscape might be experienced and viewed. What is the physical and emotional texture of a landscape’s culture, its colors, economics, ecology, energy, politics, climate, history, seduction, production, cultivation, restrictions, and humanity? While the landscape being proposed here is one of integrations and unification, it is not homogenous, and the experiences of it are always specific.

"Unclassified (glowing octo/squid spec. #081404" Brian Burkhardt

This exhibition brings together six possibilities of landscape through the work of Hilary Baldwin, Jason Bartsch, Brian Burkhardt, Evelyn Rydz, Jamie Vasta, and Lauren Warner. The artists in this project focus on the nature of landscape, blurring definitions and making boundaries between organic and synthetic, mediated and direct encounters, daydreams and consciousness, and between one place and another more fluid that fixed. Landscape can be a destination, a road side attraction, a designated site to seek out and visit, a National Park, a treasured place to preserve and protect, a nostalgic image of pre-industrial times, an untouched setting, an accumulation of ecological phenomena, an event, a mediated experience, a debris pile, a background or set, a stage for human lives, the site of an archeological dig revealing fragments of time and place. It can be everything and it can be nothing.