Material Landscapes

Contemporary artists explore our relationship with land, landscape, nature and place in a wide variety of ways.  Some do so by using the tools and strategies of the naturalist and scientist to sample, record and understand nature, natural materials, and processes.  They might also use the techniques of the cartographer to map and record a specific place in terms of its physical appearance and geography.  Other artists may benefit from the insights that anthropologists have gained from an examination of human cultural practices that illuminate and contextualize our understanding of and interaction with nature.  Another group of artists might study the accumulated wisdom of philosophical, religious, spiritual or mystical traditions that tie people to the natural environment or the animals and plants that inhabit it.

Each of these different approaches illuminates our relationship with land and nature from a specific disciplinary or philosophical perspective.  One might expect these different perspectives to contradict each other, but what happens instead is that they complement one another, and provide us with a more detailed, nuanced and dimensional understanding of the natural world and our perceptions of it.

While the four artists in this exhibition epitomize the value of exploring nature from different aesthetic and disciplinary perspectives, their individual approaches do overlap in several ways.  They share a common concern for materiality, for instance.  This might mean that they make art with materials taken from nature (in the manner of a specimen), as Craig Goodworth does with his root mass sculptures.  Conversely, it might also mean that the materials they use to make work about nature are intentionally man-made in order to highlight the degree to which our reliance on technology has alienated us from the natural world. Jonathan Bucci’s sculptures, made with artificial materials like duct tape and caulking, fall into this category.

Place, and a sense of place, is also important to all four artists.  Michael Boonstra’s drawings begin with rubbings made from a tree stump in a section of national forest land near Eugene that has been salvage-logged after a cataclysmic forest fire.  Boonstra had been visiting a swimming hole near the stump with his family for many years before the fire, and is intimately familiar with that particular place.  Goodworth and Boonstra’s work explore the landscape of American West.  Jonathan Bucci focuses on the Pacific Northwest as well as his native Northeast.  Andries Fourie’s work concerns itself with the Southern-African landscape he grew up in, and explores issues like identity, memory, tradition and culture as they intersect with landscape and a relationship with the land.

The work of these four artists invites the viewer to compare his or her own experience of landscape and nature with theirs.  Their sculptures, paintings, drawings and photographs record their own insights, values, and interaction with the natural world.  They attempt to communicate both the visceral and intellectual aspects of their experience of nature.  Ultimately, the purpose of the work is to stimulate a dialogue that has the potential to enrich our understanding of the nature of our relationship with the land that surrounds us.