“History repeats her tale unconsciously, and goes off into a mystic rhyme; ages are prototypes of other ages, and the winding course of time brings us round to the same spot again.”
- James Burns, 1845, The Christian Remembrancer
Landscape art is inherently political, and the genre played a foundational role in the establishment of a national identity in the US in the mid-1800s. Through this interweaving between politics and art, colonial ideals are weaponized and propagated by canonical American landscapes. American Landscape Cannon dissects historical perceptions about the environment that have lingered for centuries through printmaking installation. Each print is modelled after a landscape by a renowned nineteenth-century American artist, reimagining culturally inherited ideas passed down through seemingly innocuous imagery.
Landscape compositions can be used as a code to understand historical ideologies, through which we can comprehend contemporary environments. The process of translating, collaging, and carving abstracts familiar symbols. Printmaking is an unreliable translator, no message conveyed the same way twice. Suspended from tree branches, the translations layer on top of each other, constantly shifting. A light shines, casting shadows and forming new landscapes again. When a scene is illuminated, what is obscured? What is hidden? What is left?
