Hard Look Soft Gaze
HARD LOOK SOFT GAZE
To take a long, hard look at something means to examine it very carefully in order to improve it in the future. A Landscape both Appearing and Disappearing attempts to capture the disappearing landscape of an old growth temperate rainforest typical of the west coast archipelago through a panoramic shift from light to dark, and from dark to light in the context of a rising or setting sun. All forests are in a constant state of flux, continually migrating at the glacial pace that they have evolved to within the historical pace of climate change. As old growth ages and dies naturally, the kinds and types of trees slowly shift to suit the conditions of the ecosystems that they are an integral part of. These changes occur over centuries, giving all the flora and fauna that are a part of these ecosystems time to adapt and continue to thrive. With human intervention this pace has fundamentally changed so radically that they can no longer adapt. Forests are disappearing from places they have inhabited for centuries, and new ones are popping up in places they have never been seen before, such as in the arctic tundra. Clearcut old growth will never be allowed to become old growth again, instead replaced with different kinds of trees that are less about the ecosystems they are meant to replenish and chosen more for the kind of lumber they produce in the short term. We are collectively in a moment of great change in our relationship with the landscape in terms of sustainability, as we now know that widespread industrial extraction is no longer tenable in the way that we have been doing it in the past. It is now time for a hard look at our relationship with the landscape before the ecosystems that we are a part of no longer exist, to be able to understand how we will fit within it. A Landscape both Appearing and Disappearing is not a refutation of change but an attempt to document and capture this landscape’s essence in the context of this place and time before it is irrevocably gone, fading into the temporal periphery of an unknown future.
A soft gaze allows your periphery to seep into your focus. It provides context and situational awareness. It has the power to enable us to see the bigger picture, the forest instead of a single tree. Displaying over two dozen landscapes in a single room necessitates a soft gaze in which to take them all in- one must look at the forest. These landscapes begin with a painting that predates 1600 and spans all the way into our current century. Over two dozen perspectives from nearly as many artists that begin before industrialization provide glimpses into our relationship with the landscape over the centuries that has the potential to provide some insight into how we arrived at this present moment. I hesitate to reframe or recontextualize the diverse perspectives represented within this salon, knowing well that they will be viewed in the context of the viewer’s lived experience of this time and place regardless, but also because I do not want to take away the agency and voices of the artists both living and dead. My work is not a direct response to the paintings on view, a critique of their perspectives or a comment on their individual art practices. In bringing this collection of landscapes into view I sought to gain some insight into our relationship with the land through a collective lens of landscape painting to find a desire path to an idealized future in an individual way. Arranged in chronological order from left to right in a horizontal salon, the viewer must move parallel to the horizon with a soft gaze, only able to move towards it through refocussing their gaze into the perspective created within each work and through their own imagination. I would dare to venture that many of the perspectives found within this collection of works represent an idealised view. I believe this to be facilitated by the seductive materiality and processes of painting and the tendency to romanticise the landscape as a means of re-establishing a meaningful relationship with nature. Utopias can only ever exist in the past or the future. Yet utopian landscapes can be a critical way in which to imagine the kinds of future landscapes we want to inhabit. They form a vision of a future that we can work towards achieving, no matter how fantastical or impossible they might seem to us now. Forests change. Landscapes change. People change. We know now without a doubt that we are the principal drivers in changing the world, and that we have a collective decision to make in what we change it into. Through looking at past manifestations of idealised landscapes we are given the means to imagine our future.