Geomorph: Rethinking Landscape
August 16 - September 15, 2008

A mixed-media show focusing on varied representations and embodiments of “landscape.”
Artists include Peter Ligon, Mark Schatz, Lisa Nersesova, Lanie DeLay, Mike Westfried and Jim Malone.

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Essay by Charissa N. Terranova

If we begin to rethink “landscape” in terms of “geomorph,” then we start to understand the earth and our perception of it in terms of the many splendored things they are.  It is to shift from stasis and inertia, or literally “the state of the land,” to change and adaptability, or “the morphing earth.”

The exhibition Geomorph begins with a central convention of landscape painting, namely that it is a view onto an open space.  An enormous urban vista, Peter Ligon’s 30-foot by 5-foot “Carroll and Columbia” is a panoramic drawing that unfurls onto the wall as a view onto space.  A rendering of the area on Elm Street around the Shamrock Hotel, an old flophouse turned artists’ space, this is a city-scape so large that viewing turns into walking as one is wont to enter inside of it.  His is landscape that begs physical engagement.  Ligon’s smaller painting, “Lori’s Studio,” is off-kilter with paint creating depth, recession and counterintuitive flatness all at once.  Mike Westfried tweaks this age-old tradition in painting by manipulating the window-like view into three-dimensional space.  Showing in the project room down the hallway, UNIT 7, Westfried’s “Superbeings” denies that depth, creating surface upon surface dappled with giga-sized ants.  The top of this long painting literally peals off only to languor ambiguously on the floor.

From the sixteenth-century Flemish Gerardus Mercator to the twentieth-century pan-European avant-garde group the Situationists, cartography has provided another means for understanding landscape.  Jim Malone brings together large photographic images and small delicate cartographic outlines of rivers, countries, and routes in wire.  “Truck” is a blur of frenzied movement: a large, glistening photograph of a semi truck blazing down a desert highway with a cross-country route mounted below in the thin silver line of a wire.  In a more perverse coupling, “Frances” is a giant picture of Malone’s meowing cat with an outline in wire of the Yangtze River mounted below.  Mark Schatz makes ad hoc topographic maps out of remnants of cardboard. “Perpetual Motion” brings together land and sky, with cardboard providing a ground for the floating figures of cottony clouds above.  For Schatz, this work “subvert[s] the devices of place-making that structure[s] an understanding of these environments.”

In the work of Lanie DeLay and Lisa Nersesova, geomorph becomes psychological.  Landscape in this instance becomes so many planes and rolling hills of the mind and body at work together and completely at odds.  DeLay and Nersesova use string to connect space to space in their projects, bringing to mind Marcel Duchamp’s “Mile of String,” a gigantic entangling web created for the opening of André Breton’s First Papers of Surrealism in 1942.  Together DeLay’s “Evidence,” a wall of receipts, and “Tracking,” a large traffic map with strings mapping a person’s movement, bring to mind the investigations of a private eye in a noir film.  These two pieces show the creepy underbelly of geomorph – the shape-shifting and elusive space of one’s last movements before being dearly departed.  In Lisa Nersesova’s untitled installations, she uses herself as a prism through which to rethink landscape.  For Nersesova, the body becomes the topography of powerful emotions – a psycho-scape of quiet solitude, happiness, and the secret hollows of dread, fear and trembling, and, on rare occasion, sickness unto death.  Nersesova’s painted bodies tumble and dance along the wall, moving above, through and beyond the skeins of life’s ongoing ups-and-downs, today’s tribulations and tomorrow’s overcoming.

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