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

Elizabeth Bryant

My work utilizes historic garden plans cut into contemporary scenic photographic posters and murals to examine our culturally mediated relationship to nature and how it might reflect and influence our sense of time and place.

The familiar photographic imagery depicts archetypal views of the landscape derived from classical painting, while the ground plans are from historic European and Asian gardens selected for their specific references to time and place and their obsessive ordering of the natural terrain. A mediation between culture and nature is manifested in the construction of these images and sites whose symbolic significance reflects a collective desire to both control and romanticize nature. The artwork forms a hybrid in which perceptions of nature overlap visually, culturally, and historically.

On a formal level these pieces complicate the illusion of depth in the scenic image by interrupting it with the incised diagram of the garden. The cut prints are hung to allow the cut-out garden plan to cast a shadow on the wall, an element that acts as an index of the present and serves to extend the inherent interplay of time and place in the work. Several mural works utilize large scale and reconfigure the cut-out pieces into a mobile construction, activated by the viewer’s motion to generate constantly changing views through and between the cut-out shapes of the scenic mural and mobile. Like the cast shadows, these fluctuating views accentuate the viewer’s present position in the gallery while simultaneously referring to the illusion of space in the generic scenic image and the map of a tea garden path in Kyoto.