Archive Post-Landscape: Between Nature and Culture

Curator's Essay | Images from the Exhibition | Kim Abeles Sandow Birk | Laurie Brown | Elizabeth Bryant The Center for Land Use Interpretation | Wanda Hammerbeck Andreas Hessing | Sant Khalsa | Skeet McAuley Kathryn Miller | Diana Thater | Post-Landscape Home Page Archive - Fall 2001 Home

Sandow Birk

Raised on the beaches of Orange County and currently living and working in Los Angeles, Sandow Birk is a product of California culture. Well traveled and a graduate of the Otis/Parsons Art Institute, Birk in his work has dealt with Los Angeles in its entirety. With an emphasis on social issues, frequent themes of his past work have included daily life in L.A.'s barrios, inner city violence, graffiti, various political issues, surfing, and skateboarding.

From its location at the edge of the continent, through the Gold Rush to the screens of Hollywood, California has long symbolized an American Eden. In the late 19th century, artist-explorers such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and others depicted the California landscape in a variety of manners. Combining Romantic concepts of the sublime with newer ideas concerning the picturesque, these artists helped create the myth of an Arcadian California even as they painted it. At the dawn of the 21st century, this American view of the West begs to be updated. California currently has a higher percentage of its population in prison than any other place in the world, with more than a quarter million prisoners housed in more than 40 state and federal prisons. As more and more individuals are incarcerated, California is fast becoming a landscape of imprisonment, confinement, and despair.

Prisonation examines how the images of early landscape artists fueled the myth of California as a promised American paradise. Yet where once the state was seen as a wild, untamed, God-given destination of hope and possibility, it is time that its romantic image accommodates the realities of the society that has resulted from its past aspirations.