Counter Nature 2, 2010
Toomey Tourell Fine Art
San Francisco, CA
October 1 - October 31, 2010
Landscape images, in packaging the experience of nature, deactivate our looking and respond
to our anticipated experience of the landscape as an image. Following the
notion of landscape as a culturally determined designation, the viewer is asked to take part
in the reconstruction of these landscapes in an indeterminate space, where both the elements
of the landscape and picture plane itself are in play, simultaneously projecting toward and
receding away from the viewer.
In Counter Nature and Counter Nature 2, the motion nascent in the landscape
images of Niagara National Park, Hanauma Bay, and Half Moon Bay becomes emphatic through
a method of painting that intensifies
the experience of perception. The paint is meticulously layered and stenciled to produce an
interplay of edges, details, and gestures executed in reverse on sheets of polycarbonate
or on the surfaces acrylic cubes, breaking apart the visual hierarchy of the landscape into a
multiplicity of possible areas of focus. One series is arranged on wall-mounted shelves,
recontextualizing the experience of the landscape image as a kind of collectable object.
Whether finalized behind polycarbonate or turning the corner of a cube, painterly gestures
take on a conceptual rather than emotive reading. The effect produced demonstrates the need
to renegotiate the speed of consumption of the landscape image. Instead of performing the looking
for the viewer, this work seeks to embody a kind of traveling through perception, creating
landscapes for the inertial tourist.
Accompanying this exhibition is a series of photographs transferred onto small acrylic cubes.
Each set of cubes consist of four cubes that feature the same landscape image wrapped around
the four sides of each cube; the set of cubes is then arranged either in a line or a cluster.
The sets invert the panoramic view to express both the infinitely divisible and discrete
nature of the reproducible image and the cadence produced by the cropping and cornering of
the image into separate planes of event.