Wildland Ryan Browning
Travis Childers
Frank Day
Susan Main
Elizabeth Hoeckel
Joshua Wade Smith
Savanna Leigh Peter Stern
Polly Townsend
The Silber ART Gallery Goucher College Athenaeum
We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. —Wallace Stegner
Wildland, a satellite exhibition in conjunction with Artscape, features the work of nine local artists: Ryan Browning, Travis Childers, Frank Day, Elizabeth Hoeckel, Savanna Leigh, Susan Main, Joshua Smith, Peter Stern, and Polly Townsend. While viewing submissions from the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts and looking for an overall arching theme, I was struck by the large number of local artists whose work seemed to be derived from the landscape. Landscape has been an artistic subject for centuries—Goucher College has even mounted a few shows around the theme. However, in this case I noticed a narrower or sub-theme of wilderness and outdoor recreation—Images of camper trailers nestled in the woods, wild animals, mountaineers, and people gathered together as if looking out over a scenic view mingled with more traditional nature imagery. Thus, each artist in Wildland draws inspiration from the great outdoors, inviting the viewer to explore the wilderness through their eyes and experiences.
Laura Amussen, curator
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Ryan Browning grew up in suburban Houston playing video games and reading fantasy and science fiction novels. In fact, he can’t remember doing much else as a teen. Actually, on second thought, it would be wrong to omit the days on end playing pen-and-paper role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy card games like Magic the Gathering. His work as an artist is fueled by these escapist and fantastic unrealities, and he explores memories of virtual worlds and landscapes in an effort to reconcile both real and virtual space as one. The resulting objects and images inhabit a mythology of visual and sublime virtual experience, and often suggest a kind of hybrid existence between worlds, where the crafted object takes on the form of the virtual memory.
Image Guardian, 2008 oak strips 9’ x 3’ x 3.5’
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Recently, Travis Childers has been working on a body of work relating to man’s relationship with nature. He thinks about how people use manmade materials to create their own nature, whether it takes the form of a habitat or some action they do every day, such as landscaping. People tear down forests only to replant trees using their own manicured sense of style. Natural materials, some taking centuries to form, become disposable tools, used up and tossed away without a second thought. For Brickscapes, Childers was thinking about nature retaking the world from man, as it often does in abandoned buildings or areas. We use bricks to build houses and walls to section ourselves off not only from nature, but also from each other. The landscapes on the bricks represent all the different regions man has “conquered.” Looking at the world around us, we see very few places where people haven’t left a mark.
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Brickscapes, 2011 mixed media on bricks, installation dimensions variable
Laredo 2, 2010 archival pigment print 44� x 66�
Frank Hallam Day is interested in culture, history, and humanity’s footprint on the natural world. His images of RVs lodged deeply in impenetrable night jungles suggest a humanity isolated from a dark, unpredictable, and ominous nature. The powerful sense of displacement and alienation from the natural world conveys a relationship with nature where something has gone very wrong. The occupants of these pods are sealed off from the natural world looming just beyond. Nothing is more American than an RV, but these pictures use RVs to suggest we aren’t headed anywhere good. In these images, the RVs are the night song of a dark American dream, lovely and glowing, yet somehow toxic and chilling. The images are intended to look staged, almost dreamlike, halfway between fantasy and reality, but they are not—Day is out on the road in Florida every night, week after week, with lights and tripod looking for appropriate RVs. He then uses incandescent lighting and (as the star streaks will show) time exposures to make the image. The occupants never know he’s there; their blinds are drawn and their televisions are on.
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Through collage and mixed-media work, Beth Hoeckel conjures a vividly beautiful and mysterious world beyond our wildest imaginations. Much of her work is figurative and landscape-oriented and recalls surreal dreamscapes and whimsical hallucinations. Her choice not to reveal the subjects’ faces or expressions compels the viewer to imagine what could be happening in the scene and to what consequence. By combining vintage-inspired, found imagery; futuristic scenery; and mesmerizing colors, she is able to produce an evocative narrative that lures the viewer in and entices them to imagine what secrets might be concealed.
Cream, 2011 collage on paper 6.5” x 8.5”
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Tectonic, 2011 film still 8.5” x 11”
Savanna Leigh combines film, sculpture, and painting to describe placelessness: the emotional connection to a place that no longer exists. Leigh’s moving landscapes traverse time and space, constantly shifting and rearranging. These transformations create amorphous landscapes that are informed by geologic plate tectonics—the actual movement of the Earth’s crust. By merging scientific geology with emotional geography, Leigh creates abstract ghosts of places past.
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By exploring landscape, light, and language, Susan Main examines the wildness of attention and perception through video, drawing, and painting. Gathering seconds of light, opening the camera to one yard of ground, pairing breath with a view of the horizon, her work draws simple boundaries in time and space as a way to orient under the elusive, shifting conditions of everyday natural phenomena. Presenting a landscape that fluctuates between containment and release, focus and dissolution, attachment and sacrifice, Main offers an everyday wilderness teetering on the threshold of perception.
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Grass, Sky, (Fly), 2008 single-channel color video still
Indebted to the spirit of Emerson’s selfreliant man, Joshua Wade Smith designs purpose-built sculpture kits—makeshift ladders, suitcases, and backpacks—that walk the line between tool and prop, and provide him with a poetic means for his endurance-based performances. Employing these kits he can build a camp, climb a mountain, raze it, and rebuild it anew at the next turnabout. Smith’s work seeks to bridge the gap between the gallery and the outdoors in a Sisyphean search for a Contemporary Sublime.
Over the Mountain, 2009 mixed media, (image of performance) dimensions variable
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Understanding the photographs of Peter Stern requires one to understand the process he undergoes to obtain these images. Many aerial photographers hire a pilot and sit in the passenger seat, unencumbered by the task of flying while they shoot. Stern is the pilot and the photographer—an extraordinary and often challenging combination. Day-long flying missions at low altitudes utilize all of his concentration and skills to stay safe and produce the work. His dramatic images are the result of first being drawn to complex landforms that he initially views from his ultralight airplane, and seeing the potential abstract beauty of land forms such as coal ridges, strip mines, and marshland laid with irrigation line. Stern uses a Nikon D300 camera with a Zeiss 50 mm lens that he hand-holds, and he prints his images in his home studio. The photographs are unaltered in color and composition; what the mind records is the juxtaposition of earth, extracted, altered, and restored, yet caught serenely for a moment from above.
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Marsh Spirit Figure, 2010 inkjet digital aerial photograph 20� x 26�
Driven by the desire to find her ultimate landscape, Polly Townsend has traveled to some of the most remote and inaccessible regions in the world. Her paintings present the world beyond our experience—vast, untouched, desolate, and uninhabitable. Townsend’s work is developed mainly from memory, but also from photos, drawings, and paintings made during long, unplanned, and usually solo journeys through remote high plateau and mountain regions. Townsend’s paintings are a study of her physical and emotional response to these vast, uninhabited vistas, which variously inspire, overwhelm, and intimidate. Often, Townsend will literally paint across the canvas from one side to the other to physically represent her journey, or use compositional devices to highlight her own routes and memories of the space. Returning to her studio to complete the work in an urban environment provides a space through which the memories and sensory experiences can be filtered and gives the work a more multilayered, abstract perspective.
Reformed, 2011 oil on canvas 66” x 70”
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Wildland Ryan Browning Travis Childers Frank Day Elizabeth Hoeckel Savanna Leigh
Susan Main Joshua Wade Smith Peter Stern Polly Townsend
June 28 – August 7, 2011 artists’ Reception
Saturday, July 9, 2011, 3-5 p.m.
The Silber Art Gallery Goucher College Athenaeum Directions
Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus. Gallery Hours
11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday – Sunday. 410.337.6477
The Silber Art Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the NEA, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.
www.goucher.edu/silbergallery
11620-J530 06/11
The Silber Art Gallery is free and open to the public.