Landscapes of the 2020 Salina Biennial

As we move into the next galleries of the Salina Biennial we will leave the terrain of bodies and identities behind and start exploring the natural world. While grouping these works together juror Ksenya Gurshtein drew inspiration from the historical traditions of landscape and still life, focusing on the push and pull of human influence over our environment. The galleries are aptly titled “Where Nature Ends and Culture Begins.” This first week we have been looking specifically at landscapes.

There is an established tradition of landscape painting in the United States, first made popular by the Hudson River School, led by artist Thomas Cole. This group was influenced by European Romanticism and their work embodied the idea of the Sublime, that nature possessed an extraordinary beauty and vastness but was also untamed and capable of great violence. Their work was created to document the expansion of the United States, and to elicit a religious response, to instill the fear of God in the viewer (see Thomas Cole’s “The Oxbow” in recommended reading). As the Hudson River School started to expand their geography many of the artists looked West to unexplored and unclaimed land. Albert Bierstadt is probably the most well known artist from this group, his work becoming synonymous with western expansion. Bierstadt’s large scale paintings served as documentation of God’s handiwork, used to show the grandeur of the West to potential settlers.

With landscapes, as with all types of art, there is a larger meaning beneath the surface of the image. Most of the romanticized images of the West were fundamental to perpetuating the idea of Manifest Destiny; the belief that this Eden was waiting to be tamed and developed by European settlers. This is a particularly masculine activity, as women would not have been considered capable. The idea of “taming” unfortunately also included the indigenous populations that have existed on this land for generations. The romantic and sublime depictions of the West and indigenous cultures make up the Colonial Gaze (more gazes!), or the idea that we are consuming the landscape through a particularly white, male, European lens. The romanticized idea of the West still plays an influential role in our culture today.

Lilly McElroy’s work “Sanding Away a Year’s Worth of Sunsets” attempts to physically challenge or erase the Colonial Gaze and the romanticized West. McElroy’s actions “face the sublime and call its power into question.” From the artist’s statement: “In the project, Sanding Away A Year's Worth of Sunsets, a year’s worth of suns—365 photographs of the setting sun in the landscape—were collected, stacked into a monolith, and methodically altered by my hand. Day by day, I sanded through the stack of images toward the source of light—a gesture that is small, intimate and tender, yet ultimately removes the sun as the subject and replaces it with a growing void. The act of erasure is accomplished through the insertion of a female form—represented in this body of work by the agency of my body as well as a chasm that grows more and more vulvic after each hour of sanding.”

Laura Snyder and Joseph Vavak both talk about their role as documentarians, but perhaps their work focuses on nature’s reclamation of colonized land. Laura Snyder’s work “The Weight of History” is a poignant image of a farmhouse, perhaps built by settlers claiming their own part of the vast wilderness. The sunken roof and the title both referring the ways in which our constructed histories can collapse.

-Gretchen Boyum, Interim Curator, Salina Art Center