Immersive Landscapes

Immersive Landscapes: Contemporary Female Artists Reconsider a Traditional Genre

BY ANDREA ALVAREZ

Three Nordic artists consider the relationship between humans and the natural world, and the impact of climate change on both. Here, engagement with nature is not merely an aesthetic choice, but an experiential and phenomenological imperative.

Nordic artists have long been engaged in the landscape tradition, although this classical genre has largely been dominated by male painters. In the Nordic contemporary art world, female artists are increasingly celebrated for their contributions, especially those that engage with tradition in new manners. For artists like Sigrid Sandström, Kristiina Uusitalo, and Apichaya Wanthiang (who live in Sweden, Finland, and Norway respectively), the landscape genre provides a rich backdrop to their more penetrating and immersive practices. Each artist, in her own way, considers the relationship between humans and the natural world, and the impact of climate change on both. Engagement with nature in their art practices is not merely an aesthetic choice, but an experiential and phenomenological imperative. The work implicates their audience by expanding its field 114

beyond the frame and into the physical and psychological space of each viewer.

Sigrid Sandström (Swedish, born 1970) uses her abstract paintings to evoke a sense of immediacy, as though the plasticky surfaces always remain freshly painted, and as though the diaphanous forms might blow in the wind. The minute details of her textures call attention to the materiality of the work, which has already been centered by how they are installed. Through the layout of her exhibitions, Sandström explores what she calls the “site of painting,” which is to say that the arena in which the paintings function does not end at the edges of the canvas. Rather, they are often juxtaposed in relation to one another: wall-based works are hung throughout, while freestanding upright or recumbent canvases and mirrors populate the gallery floor. In a recent exhibition in Houston, Texas, small paintings were placed throughout the gallery to foreground the wall pieces and create a dialogue between the wall-based works, the smaller works, and the visitor. This dialogue draws the visitor’s attention to their physical position in the gal

lery, oftentimes pulling them away from the wall-based works so as to accommodate the smaller works in their visual field. By virtue of this imperative to move into the expanded painting field, the visitor comes to experi- ence the works as though from within. While paintings that Sandström made earlier in her career contained more literal connections to landscapes, today she instead creates her own experiential landscapes within the space of the gallery. The uninhabited Arctic worlds she once painted are now evoked experientially to the viewers, who feel both alien and im- plicated in these unfamiliar domains.

Kristiina Uusitalo’s (Finnish, born 1959) paintings, similarly, seem to vacillate between worlds, though hers are contained within her canvases. The backgrounds evoke brightly coloured, barren landscapes that look like empty stages for human life. Meanwhile, on the surface, floating forms and gestures seem to exist both in the distant painted world and in the liminal space between work and viewer. Uusitalo’s work from the early 2010s blended figuration, landscape imagery, and abstraction. For this Finnish artist, whose forebears in the landscape tradition include Werner Holmberg (Finnish, 1830–1860) and Fanny Churberg (Finnish, 1845–1892), tree-lined wintry vistas serve as fundamental elements upon which to build dream-like mirages that are simultaneously familiar and fantastical.

In recent years, Uusitalo has released herself of external referents, relying instead on gestures and abstract forms to populate the surface of her canvases. These organic images seem to belong to the natural world, as they spread across the canvas like a proliferation of plants in a wilderness. By moving from a representational mode in which she was clearly engaged with Finnish wooded landscapes, to one in which she allows the viewer’s imagination to soar, Uusitalo moves the landscape genre from the purely formal tradition to a psychological and phenomeno- logical practice.

Apichaya Wanthiang, A Hush Falls, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 194 x 297 cm. Photo by Trond Isaksen. Courtesy the artist and Galleri Brandstrup

Few Nordic contemporary artists create art- works that are as immersive and enveloping as Apichaya Wanthiang (Thai, born 1987, lives and works in Norway). She is celebrated as a painter, but her practice includes a range of disciplines including video, performance, and installation art. The large paintings she has been making in recent years are much more representational than those by Sand- ström and Uusitalo, but their hallucinogenic and radioactive colour palette keeps them from hewing closely to the real world. The watery surfaces of her work are created us- ing thin, fast-drying paint that renders the surface contradictorily arid.

Although Wanthiang lives and works in Oslo, the subject of her current practice is the waterlogged landscape of Northeast Thai- land, which has been flooding dangerously often, subjecting her family and hometown to unstable conditions. Wanthiang’s tropi- cal and precarious scenes contain a sense of restlessness and instability that has become part of the lived experience for those who reside in the region. Wanthiang uses her installations to further convey these natural conditions, sometimes using coloured films and light filters to bathe gallery spaces in fiery reds and oranges, such as in a 2019 exhibition at Heimdal Kunstforening in Norway—and at other times by manipulating gallery temperatures to create a heated space when pictorally evoking her sunny homeland.

In 2015, Sandström also filtered light entering a gallery through yellow cellophane; these techniques serve to envelop the audi- ence and implicate each viewer in the work itself. This implies a sense of the viewer’s agency in the depicted landscapes, and per- haps ultimately, provokes a kinship between humans and their natural world. For artists like Sandström, Uusitalo, and Wanthiang, who are not only witnessing but also com- menting on the effects of climate change, this may be the most urgent consequence of their work. ◻