Landscape
1991
sheetrock cut to topography of 30th parallel, dirt from local landfill, plywood
(American landscape painting) oil on linen, wood, plaster, gold and metal leaf
(Chinese scroll) ink, pigments, ground malachite and azurite on silk
(Persian miniature) paper mounted on wood, watercolor, oxidized silver leaf
Landscape is an installation about consumption of the metaphysical, through the presence of art, and about materials, through the evidence of our waste. Three traditional nature-loving philosophies, American Emersonian Pantheism, Iranian Zoroastrianism, and Chinese Taoism are represented through paintings. They offer messages ill-suited to fit contemporary culture where the volume of one’s impact on nature is neatly trucked away and buried from view and meditation is commercially mediated. In this room one is given the opportunity to experience not only “global art” about landscape, but personal interaction with landscape, as trash-laden local landfill seeps from museum walls “rotted” to the contours of the 30th parallel, the latitude that sweeps through the United States, Iran, and China.
