Landscape and Memory
curatorial statement

Skyscrapers, landfill mounds, and industrialized agriculture often lead society to collectively assume that via human engineering and construction, it is we who shape the landscape to ourselves. In contrast to this line of thought, Landscape and Memory presents the self as shaped by environment and landscape. We examine how the physical world, in the form of place and history, forms us.

Landscape and Memory explores experience and sensation of landscape rather than its image. We experience earth and place intimately and communally; from each experience we take away more than a picture. We take away spiritual pieces of place that are embedded in our haptic consciousness. Landscape and Memory is an antithesis to a photo show or a photo album. Landscape and Memory is antithetical to landscape as purely picturesque. The show stands in contrast to the sterile death of a location’s depth and history via the flattened moment in time, of a camera’s shutter and its subsequent object of memento. And although it does not exclude photography, Landscape and Memory presents these experiences through a diversity of artists and media.

This exhibition explores the memory of the land itself. To trace memory is to unpack, relive, or mentally remake experience along the trail of our sensory perception of landscape and earth. Grandmother to civilizations that have camped, bled, built, and destroyed upon her surface, the land itself holds a memory of time far beyond the mental capacity of humankind. Be it geological, anthropological, or spiritual, memory is imprinted upon location, earth, and upon our own consciousness through the vehicle of formative experience with earth and landscape. This exhibition has the opportunity to explore landscape’s memory as we review a changing landscape in a warming climate and industrially intoxicated planet. The exhibition points to an erosion of land and mind. But also, the exhibition desires to reveal the ability of land and place to restore and revive, both itself and our human spirit.

Landscape and Memory incorporates media in film, object, and material that record experience and trace memory beyond symbol & image, finding a place in-between land and mind. Landscape and Memory moves beyond surface into the depths of perception and sensation grounded by a greater landscape and shared human experience, evolution, geology, and memory.

– Joshua Ray Smith, curator