ATMOSPHERIC PERSPECTIVE
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“No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes, roads, creatures, and people.”
— Wendell Berry
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TO LOVE HOME
I’m thinking of you, my love. You linger, always, brimming in that space that feels like an ungraspable cloud at the back of my head. Sometimes you rise and preoccupy the front of my thin gray cortex, sitting right atop the bones of my eyebrows, catching my eye, igniting my imagination, your presence looming. Sometimes you swell in my chest, squeezing the left side beneath my breast with clutches of wonder and affection. Sometimes you travel deeper and lower and stir in me a worry, and a hope. Sometimes you grip the calloused and tender soles of my feet against the firmness and softness of your own body, of which I am a part, to which I belong, to which I want to tend well.
My love, I am not a scientist who understands the spectacular patterns of your design, the character of each molecule, or the cold calculations
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and equations that compose your rhythms and idiosyncrasies. I am not a scholar who can recite your many names in Latin, or recount your eons or epochs, nor a philosopher to expound on your cosmology. I am not a politician with an agenda to prescribe or policy to enact. I am not a poet, nor really much of an artist able to articulate the matters of your profound beauty. But I am a human. And all humans have love. As I do for you. And love letters are the place to say that love can change the world.
So my love, I have gathered for you, for us, this collection of memorials and musings—a collection of love really, that has been given form. These forms sing my admirations, investigations, ponderings, confessions, longings, and commitments. These materialized visions that touch the sweeping arc of our intricate love story are assembled here in this small corner of time and space to be shared with all those who also occupy this place with us, right here, right now.
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I shall always love recounting first falling. I love basking in those early feelings of your overwhelming presence. My eyes blurred with the rose-colored light of your shocking, radiant beauty. Ten thousand tiny sparks, drawing me in closer, each one a unique and clear artifact waiting to be discovered, to be seen. The grand vision of really knowing you was
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ungraspable then, and still, I know you will fascinate my curiosity until my last breath. As if through a window I gazed upon you, a guarded interior built around me, mediating the exterior knowing of your ways. And how shall I know you? How shall I learn every chamber of your heart, your loves, your needs, your desires?
Ecologists and psychiatrists chase objectivity as a way of knowing, but how can understanding ever be complete without this messy subjectivity of feelings, of culture, of beauty? Without this hazy perspective of falling in love? What if art and science linked arms to bring into focus, to melt away this dialectic of inside and outside, to nurture the depth of our relationship into a symbiotic place of deeper knowing?
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Your beauty is undeniable. Serene. Graceful. Powerful. Your subtle shifting moods, plush verdant fertility, your grandeur, your hidden ways waiting to be discovered stir in me a thirst, a longing, a dream to be close to you. Even the smallest details of you are sublime, like the succulent droplets on my window, each one a crystal ball containing and reflecting your whole self and myself contained within you. And the wonders of what cannot be seen!
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The profound mystery of your inner-workings, your minutia draws me to you like Cupid’s arrow to its bullseye. How my mind works and turns, studies, and seeks your transcendence. Not even one can deny your splendor; all are arrested by your beauty. Does your idyllic nature have some fundamental, some universal essence to it? Surely not only I who adore you. Certainly, the “idyllic” must be a mutable notion, the western canon only painting a narrow picture of your many beautiful faces. And what is this notion of the ideal? A space uninterrupted, undisturbed? One of Homeostasis? Homogeny? Diversity? Balance? Reciprocity? Is there
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some sort of fundamental way that I belong to you, inside of you, not to exploit your rich resources, but to help steward them? Your appeal is so deep and broad I need only ask another, to listen and to learn what it is that moves them, to in turn discover new ways of living to love you.
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Even as I have adored you, I must confess I have not always cared for you thusly. I have filled you with a foreign light unlike the sun as you long for rest. I have made you run dry and exacerbated the storms of your fury like a lover scorned. As I have studied your essence at my feet or
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the expanse of your wonder, you filter through my own impediments and interruptions.
Your uncontained wildness contained in the grid of my own understanding, my own existence, my own convenience, my own gain and profit. I have compartmentalized and dissected and neglected and interrupted. I have oriented you to myself, until there is hardly a scrap of space left for you in my design. I can feel your absence as my presence grows; you are relegated like some impossibly perfect portrait, a relic on my desk of your younger, more beautiful years past. I have not tended you as the part of my own soul that you are, even when you have fed me and held all of my flourishing. You have never stopped loving me, despite my unfaithfulness. Forgive me, my beloved.
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I long for our restoration. To live in dissonance with you is a heartbreak I cannot bear. I first conceived of this love letter at 30,000 feet from within a fraught metal torpedo hurling through your incredible space. Alas, love is never uncomplicated. These images capture how it feels when I am above you, your crystalline wonder, sharp and uninhabitable, receding in hazy perspective stretched before me, a more magnificent creation than I can fathom. And I am small. And
I wonder, how can I listen and learn to speak your language, to nurture ideals around preservation, caretaking, and mutual flourishing? I must find small ways to return to gratitude.
Small efforts to create fertile ground from my own refuse. Small ways to humbly connect myself back into your essence, to rekindle, to bloom with affection.
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I’m longing for the day when the fine wrinkles across your forms appear to me like the holy shimmering of gold leaf, clinging like the very skin of heaven. A day when memories of the care I have taken to preserve and conserve and celebrate your beauty–to recognize with gratitude your Creator–collect like the small tender threads of a precious cross stitch . fine translucent layers of fog, a slow accumulation of effort and love over time. A day when I have patiently come to know you deeply and from that knowing have learned how to care for you. A day when these many questions have perhaps not found answers, but have left legacies of love for our children and children's children.
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I have hope for our love story, my darling. I’m so grateful for you, my magnificent wonder.
Love, Sarah
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“You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.' And how long is that going to take?' I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.' That could be a long time.' I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.”
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
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MORE THOUGHTS:
To Love Home - A Letter from Sarah Bernhardt, Curator and DirectorIntersect Arts Center
In the Peace of Wild Things: And Other Poems – Wendell Berry
Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer Center for the Care of Creation: www.csl.edu/resources/centers/center-care-creation
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Deliverance
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Aspenberg, Carl
Untitled : $650 | 2007 | 10.5 x 11 inches | Print, paper litho over softground etching Website : www.CarlaAspenberg.com
Bar n, Brandin
Concept for the Relocation of Miami Beach : $800 | 2022 | 17 x 21 inches Collage with mixed media Website : www.BrandinBaron.com
Baum, Michael
Badlands #9 : $200 | 2020 | 8 x 8 inches | Screenprint Badlands #13 : $150 | 2020 | 8 x 8 inches | Screenprint and archival print on Arnhem 1618 paper Badlands #7 : $250 | 2020 | 8 x 8 inches | Screenprint and archival print on Arnhem 1618 paper Website : www.MichaelBaumStudio.com
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Bonavida, Raymond
Moondance : $900 | 2020 | 22 x 22 inches | Photography
Moondance 2 : $900 | 2020 | 22 x 22 inches | Photography Moondance 3 : $900 | 2021 | 22 x 22 inches | Photography Website : www.RaymondBonavida.com
Canizales, Joseph
Cliff Cave, Missouri Portrait : $2500 | 2020 | 42 x 4 x 26 inches | Print on canvas, foam, sand from Cliff Cave County Park, Missouri Arches, Utah Portrait : $2500 | 2020 | 42 x 4 x 26 inches | Print on canvas, foam, sand from Moab, Utah Balanced Rock Around & Below : Price Upon Request | 2019 | 26.5 x 16.5 x 14 inches | Alder, PLA Trace of Humanity; Plastiglomerate : NFS | 2021 | 10 x 7 x 48 inches | Plastic Unknowable Stone : $600 | 2020 | 14 x 9 x 6 inches | Limestone, sand, eco-resin Unknowable Stone : $600 | 2021 | 7 x 8 x 6 inches | Limestone, concrete Instagram @Joseph_Canizales
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Cory, Joe
Winter’s Journey number 14 : $450 | 2019 | 18 x 18 inches | Digital photo collage printed on archival paper
Winter’s Journey number 6 : $450 | 2019 | 18 x 18 inches | Digital photo collage printed on archival paper
Winter’s Journey number 3 : $450 | 2019 | 18 x 18 inches | Digital photo collage printed on archival paper Website : www.JoeCory.com
Cotton, Jacob
Through the Eyes of a Nice Guy : NFS | 2020 | 15 x 15 inches | Graphite Website : www.JacobCotton.com | Instagram @JCotton75
Craig, Preston
Napa Red : $3,800 | 2011 | 30 x 40 x 2 inches | Acrylics Website : www.PrestonFineArts.com
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Crawford, Thomas
Under Construction : $1000 | 2019 | 17 x 37 x 2.5 inches | Digital print on archival paper
Embedded : $1000 | 2020 | 17 x 37 x 2.5 inches | Digital print on folded paper
Creighton, Robert
Ile De Sucre : $600 | 2020 | 12 x 18 inches | Intaglio/chine colle
Rains, the Commons : $600 | 2020 | 12 x 18 inches | Intaglio/chine colle Website : www.RobCreighton.ca
Cullum, Peter
Decidere #3 : $400 | 2022 | 26.5 x 38.5 inches | Digital print Website : www.PeterCullum.com
Dierker, Mark
Shades of Twister : $350 | 2020 | 16 x 24 inches | Color digital photography
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A Sense of Perspective : $350 | 2017 | 16 x 24 inches | Color digital photography
The Last Monsoon : $300 | 2018 | 18 x 24 inches | Color digital photography Website : www.BearDancerStudios.com
Dorman, Kendall
Miami Building : $200 | 2022 | 16 x 16 x 2 inches | Photograph on aluminum
BLMNATGEO : $200 | 2021 | 16 x 16 x 2 inches | Photograph on aluminum Cloud and Contrail : $200 | 2022 | 16 x 16 x 2 inches | Photograph on aluminum Website : www.WDArchitects.us | Instagram @DormanYourMan
Dunne, Jessica
Bright Wires : $800 | 2014 | 9 x 9 inches | Spit-bite aquatint
Sprinkler, Wyoming : $3000 | 2007 | 12 x 20 inches | Monotype
Following : $5000 | 2017 | 48 x 69 inches | Oil on polyester Website : www.JessicaDunne.com
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Florek, Gigi
Deliverance : NFS | 2020 | 21 x 27.5 inches | Screen-printed cotton
Gardner, Joan E.
Storm : $100 | 2019 | 9 x 11 inches | Encaustic Website : www.JoaneGardnerArtist.com
Gilbert, Brittany
Translucent Storms : $1250 | 2018 | 62 x 16 inches | Oil on individual panels Website : www.BrittanyRGilbert.com | Instagram @BrittanyRGilbert_Artist
Gripp, Nick
Landscape (tondo) : $350 | 2022 | 11.75 x 11.75 inches | Oil on board Website : www.NickGripp.com
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Hart, C. Annie
I2-282 nm 3D Distribution : $3250 | 2022 | 25 x 19.5 inches | Acrylic, aluminum, steel, stone, wood
I2-282 nm Projection : $130 | 2022 | 12 x 9 inches | Acrylic, paper
I2-282 nm Slice : $130 | 2022 | 12 x 9 inches | Acrylic, paper Website : www.ClaraHart.com | Instagram @ClaraAnnLouise
Klass, Annieo
Prism of the Sky : NFS | 2022 | 16 x 20 inches | Oil, cloth, and embroidery on canvas Website : www.AnnieoKlaas.com
Koch, Arthur
First Light : $500 | 2005 | 17.25 x 22.25 inches | Photography Website : www.AkStudio.SmugMug.com | Instagram @ArthurKochStudio
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Konits, Cindy
Husks : $450 | 2021 | 15 x 20 inches | Archival pigment print Website : www.CindyKonits.com | Instagram @CindyKonits
Lookerse, Gregory
Invisible Cities of Stone : $1500 | 2022 | 24 x 36 inches | Mixed media drawing Website : www.GregLookerse.com | Instagram @GregLookerse
Merchant, Kaitlin
Spinning x Ice Crystals : $1700 | 2021 | 30 x 20 inches | Oil on canvas Website : www.KdMerchant.com
Nalesnik, Kristin
The Way Back : $475 | 2021 | 3 x 3 inches | Hand embroidery Website : www.KristinNalesnik.com | Instagram @KristinNalesnik
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Neumann, Mark
Sleepwalker : $1650 | 2019 | 24.5 x 38 inches | Archival inkjet print
Paine, Michelle
Through the Light : $1350 | 2019 | 20 x 16 x 2 inches | Oil on canvas Website : www.MichellePaine.com | Instagram @Paine.Michelle Parker, Collier
Bullhead Bay Looking South : $3500 | 2022 | 18 x 24 inches | Oil Veduta da Via della Torre del Gallo : $3500 | 2020 | 14 x 20 inches | Oil
Price, Nancey
Spiraling #1 : $400 | 2021 | 9 x 10.5 inches | Collage
Untitled : $150 | 2022 | 9.5 x 6.3 inches | Collage Website : www.NanceyBPrice.com | Instagram @NanceyBPrice
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Sondreal, Britt
Already | Not Yet 33 : $300 | 2022 | 16 x 20 inches | Archival pigment print Website : www.BrittSondreal.com | Instagram @BSondreal
Stern, Michael E.
Emergence : $950 | 2022 | 13 x 19 inches | Digital photography Website : www.BuildaBetterPhotograph.com | Instagram @MichaelEStern
Tamblyn, Jeff
Waves of Stone : $900 | 2021 | 16 x 20 inches | Digital photography Website : www.JeffTamblynPhotographicArt.com | Instagram @JeffTamblyn_PhotographicArt
Tanner, G. Jackson
Parathyro : $6850 | 2021 | 60 x 40 inches | Golden acrylic colors Website : www.GJacksonTanner.com
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Valdes, Eduardo
Tranquility, Shenandoah National Park : $500 | 1997 | 4 x 7.5 inches Egg tempera on gesso board Website : www.EdValdes.com | Instagram @EdValdesFine
Wilker, Emily
Frozen Compost : $800 | 2021 | 10 x 12 inches | Acrylic and human hair on watercolor paper Seth’s Compost : $800 | 2021 | 10 x 12 inches | Acrylic on watercolor paper Website : www.EmilyWilker.com
Winters, Michael
Untitled : $100 a piece | 2018 - 2022 | 16 x 16 inches | Photographic inkjet prints - some altered with oil pastel, colored pencil, leather punch Website : www.MichaelTWinters.com | Instagram @MichaelTimothyWinters
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Zoller, Stefan
Silver : $600 | 2021 | 10 x 8 inches | Acrylic on panel Crypts of Rays : $600 | 2020 | 10 x 8 inches | Acrylic on linen, mounted on panel Website : www.StefanZoller.com | Instagram @StefanZollerStudios
Bernhardt, Sarah : CURATOR Website : www.SarahBernhardtArt.com | Instagram @SrBernhardt
Parviz, April : C atalog Layout Designer Website : www.AprilParviz.ART | Instagram @AprilParviz
Thank you to Ahmed Ali and Seth Euken for assisting in installation!
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This book was lovingling handbound, for you, by local artist :
This book was lovingling handbound, for you, by local artist :
573.575.6485 | intersectstl@gmail.com | www.IntersectSTL.org/ATMOS 3636 Texas Ave, St. Louis, MO 63118
573.575.6485 | intersectstl@gmail.com | www.IntersectSTL.org/ATMOS 3636 Texas Ave, St. Louis, MO 63118
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09.12 - 11.06.22
Kristin Nalesnik
Does a digital image hold the same meaning as a tangible one? With the ubiquity of modern technology, the everyday person is able to take an infinite number of digital photos, most of which will rarely be viewed outside of cyberspace, thus offering a differing perspective between digital and tangible imagery. Using crossstitch to create a physical image, colors are worked one stitch at a time, each following a seemingly random path against a blank background. Separate at first, the stitches gradually begin to intersect and blend, form all but indistinguishable, as a homogeneous swath of hazy blues and purples. As in life, clarity often comes from a distance. The larger size of each stitched “pixel” generates a sense of motion in the viewer, paradoxically causing them to focus in on the piece by moving farther away. Up close image is abstract, yet viewed from a distance the colors begin to coalesce into a vast coherent landscape, bringing an overall lucidity to the work.
Joseph Canizales
Through digital and analog processes, I reflect upon the intertwined relationship between geological forces and the built environment. I draw connections between modern, rapid construction methods of extracting, gathering, and processing of stone and the incredibly slow yet determined march of naturally occurring erosion. I’m fascinated by humanity’s complicated relationship with geology and how we extract material from the ground without reflecting on the geologic history of the site. Expanding beyond traditional methods of making sculpture, I enthusiastically embrace emerging technologies, such as 3D printing, 3D modeling, and 3D scanning. These processes amplify my own understanding of geological sites, while the resulting work invites viewers to experience a sense of curiosity about the secrets of the geological world. Ultimately, I’m interested
in the natural environment and the dynamic relationship between humans and geology, where the viewer is challenged to see an object as both an artifact and a work of art.
My approach to investigating geology involves a conceptual space that capitalizes on digital technology while honoring the inherent nature of geological form, materiality, and time. I archive dozens of scans that I reconfigure, conglomerate, and manipulate. This commitment results in new forms that echo their original source while creating a new sensorial experience. I believe this echo is an altered version of the original—not a reflection—and that it is both factual and fictional. Through this echo, I bridge the gap between a geological site and sculpture, and what results is what I describe as echoed sites
Cliff Cave, Missouri Portrait
In this series of works Canizales portrays two geological landscapes and highlights their positive and negative relationships. Through the use of 3D scanning technology, the positive space is rendered in a de-saturated state, while the negative area is rendered in color. Instead of reflecting the landscape, he presents the negative space as positive space. Each canvas is supported on a shelf, which grounds the works back to their original position, and the sky is used as a positive space/background. He coated each shelf with sediment from each site.
Arches, Utah Portrait, and Balanced Rock Around & Below
Balanced Rock Around & Below begins as a 3D generated model through dozens of photos that were segmented and arranged in a grid. Then Canizales expands each component of the grid outward from the center of the work, which creates an inner negative space, an absence or void, which stretches into a threedimensional grid. Grids are a system that humans are familiar with for bringing order to any image or situation.
In this sculpture and the assembled grid, the digital imprint of the geologic monument marks a specific location and echoes the minimalist aesthetic of engaging negative space.
Trace of Humanity; Plastiglomerate
In Hawaii’s Kamilla Beach, known as one of the dirtiest beaches in the world, plastic trash washed up from the ocean is being melted and mixed in with sediment and basaltic lava fragments producing a new type of rock material known as “Plastiglomerate” (Proposed by geologist Patricia Corcoran, oceanographer Charles J. Moore, and artist Kelly Jazvac). Plastiglomerate is a material of both human and geological processes and has been considered a marker of the Anthropocene. We are living in an age where single-use plastic is becoming part of our geologic record. It isn’t just water pollution occurring, but this plastic is becoming part of our natural terrain. In Trace of Humanity; Plastiglomerate Canizales raises awareness of this issue.
Unknowable Stone 1, & Unknowable Stone 2
In Canizales’s series The Unknowable Stones , 2020-2021 he embraces the division between fact and fiction and makes them into one object. He found stones that have weathered or eroded into multiple parts and by adding material between each crack, he pieces the stones back together. For example, in Unknowable Stone 1 , 2020, he poured sand mixed with eco-resin to fill in the gaps. On the other hand, Unknowable Stone 2 , 2021, required a longer process. He 3D scanned each naturally occurring break in the stone to produce a digital model from which he created a 3-D printed layer, which was later cast in concrete. These newly exploded forms could suggest the object’s change of state, the conjoining of disparate parts, or filled and missing components of the form.
Collier Parker
My landscape paintings invite the viewer to suspend time and enter a familiar place where they can feel the sunlight, see and breathe the air, take in the distant blue spaces, and be surrounded by nature’s colors. I try to connect the past to the present, distant memories to feelings of the now. It is important to feel a connection to a painting. This requires a willingness to participate on the part of the viewer, but the painting should make it easy. It should feel like returning to something we already know.
Annieo Klass
My paintings are windows through which we can view segments of space or panels of atmosphere. By painting cloudscapes, I have endeavored to illustrate layers of water vapor caught by sun rays. Sometimes these layers evoke stained glass windows, sometimes airplane windows. Clouds are the subjects of my paintings, but since clouds are just accumulated masses of water vapor, more dense than the air around them, I am really painting air in various densities, defined by atmospheric perspective. I rely on the way the air has arranged itself throughout the entire landscape of the sky to create my composition. Since the position of the viewer creates the composition as well, this macro world represents an infinite reality, where the universe itself creates art.
Brittany Gilbert
Through sequential and perceptual landscape painting, my work creates a record of my experience with perpetually fluctuating environments. Outside, many variables are beyond my control. How do these add to my understanding of the nuances of a scene? Atmospheric perspective specifically conceals and reveals
forms, shapes and spatial depth. I paint the same space again and again building an intimacy from which I can respond to fluctuating conditions. With each noticeable change in appearance, I put the work aside to begin a new panel. I am interested in the shape shifts within my subject, as well as the freshness, decisiveness and immediacy of my response. The resulting image corresponds with the pace at which changes occur. Nameable objects disappear and are replaced by shifts of colors and abstract shapes vying for attention before nestling back into obscurity. Sustained engagement allows me to respond to the unexpected.
Cindy Konits
Since my first photography classes, I have always wanted to discover myself rendered small, so small and so far in the distance in wide open outdoor spaces that it may even be hard for any viewer, including myself, to find me once drawn in to look. I don’t know why the need to create these images persists. In this era of post-realist photography, I wonder if the answer may lie within the question itself. Rene Descartes demonstrated proof of his existence with the statement “I think, therefore I am”. I try to prove I exist with the discovery of myself in a photograph. The process of creating the photograph and viewing it mimics my feelings seeking sense of self in my life within an incomprehensible expanse of space and time.
Jessica Dunne
When I read this call for entry, I thought this show was made for me. Nothing gives me more pleasure than obscuring objects in the distance. I live in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset District, the area that borders the Pacific. The air is filled with atmosphere on the clearest of days. I travel and I find a bit of California wherever I go, some atmospheric obfuscation. By painting what I see, I make discoveries. By paying attention to the
details that record shifts in light, structures, and moods, I want to impart the sense of being located and included in a way that leaves an afterimage in the mind’s eye.
Robert Creighton
These works are concerned with the effects of weather on our sensibilities and senses.
Mark Neumann
My photographs incorporate prefabricated HO scale figures (often used by model railroad hobbyists) placed in natural and constructed site-specific landscapes. The images are akin to dioramas, but created in actual places. These photographs are not a result of superimposing existing images into a compositional collage. Instead, they result from traveling to places and setting up scenes using miniatures, sometimes constructing my own props, and relying on available light. Since the small-scale figures are less than one inch in size, photographs are the only way to see the “scenes” depicted in these temporary dioramas.
Brandin Bar n
Though trained as a landscape painter, I have become an artist who imposes sociopolitical content onto hyperrealized environments in order to bring awareness to personalities and events that exist outside of traditional portrayals within the history of American art. My artworks are “staged” through the process of layering my original photographic and hand-rendered imagery with stock photography and digital textures. I utilize experimental printmaking techniques, especially in the play between different surface qualities of ink/paint/
pigment, in a final output of 2-6 prints per image. Final prints are then embellished with hand-applied media, including: ink, gouache, pastel, acrylic and/or enamel, and frequent instances of collage application.
Joan E Gardner
This is a time when our literal physical atmosphere is under threat. Our social atmosphere is also contentious and is preventing us from taking the necessary actions to preserve our literal life-sustaining atmosphere. Can we summon our higher nature and preserve our precious planet? The viewer is presented with images of beauty and ambiguity that can be open to interpretation. It is my hope that it will be a catalyst for thought, the beauty of the image, a seduction and reminder of the unique miracle of the world.
Jeff Tamblyn
I work in photography with intentional blurring to suppress detail in a way that invites viewer collaboration on the narrative of the resultant, dreamlike image. For me, this piece speaks to the unattainable environmental idealism we often harbor, an image of perfection that can blunt our willingness to accept manageable solutions.
Jacob Cotton
Landscapes are an atmosphere, an environment, much like our hearts and minds. Our emotions, dreams and fears live in the landscapes of our inner being and allow us to connect these landscapes with the landscapes
of the world around us. For us the future is unknown and can only be seen as far as our thoughts and dreams can allow, in this landscape time is distance and the horizon is the limit of our fears and dreams. In the external landscape, atmospheric perspective removes the detail and the known from view, so is the same for our internal landscape. See these landscapes with not just your eyes, but your hearts and feel the unknown as I do.
Kendall Dorman
I look for and record contrasts, collisions, compliments, and curiosities of the built environment with other built environments or with natural environments - there is usually a sky or ceiling involved - and often current struggles or past better times shape the image.
Preston Craig
The nature of my work is that through the use of varied imagery, classical & digital painting techniques & humor, I make a visual commentary on topical issues that plague our society and encourage the viewer to contemplate their response. I hope the viewer is inspired to be more aware of their global connections to each other & to take personal responsibility for effecting positive change in society. Sometimes, I use acrylics, digital or mixed media to create my images. While some of my landscapes may seem more representational, there is always a spiritual energy that emanates from them and my allegorical images breathe an almost mystical “ahha” as I reveal something of myself in the painting process. I create my fantasy pieces to delight & entertain, touching that inner child that is within each of us.
Joe Cory
Inspired by composer Franz Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle, the 24 pieces in my “Winter’s Journey” series explore metaphors of human emotion through fragmented images of an imagined landscape. Hazy mountain vistas, icy rivers, rushing storms, dark forests, and menacing figures construct the monochromatic twodimensional snow globes designed to illustrate the grief, isolation, and unknown distance we journey through seasons of human suffering.
Stefan Zoller
My work is often created over the span of many months or years, layer upon layer. Their lengthy development, in addition to their elemental appearance, serve as metaphors for both geologic time and material. While the immensity of geologic time is a concept humans cannot fully comprehend given our brief lifespans, we can see clearly its effects and histories. Landscapes can be transformed over eons with the steady stream of river water, the ebb and flow of ocean tides, or the creeping movement of glaciers. The landscape references within my work also extend to that of atmospheric perspective, a practice rooted within traditional genre painting. Many layers of paint - often hazy or fragmented - obscure detail to create a physical depth within the painting itself and an illusionistic space for the viewer. By combining this illusionistic quality with the tactility of a sculptural object, I find that the viewer discovers both the familiar and the alien within the work.
C Annie Hart
In the laboratory and the studio, my work involves interactions with the atmosphere. Working in the Mabbs lab, we use velocity map imaging of photoelectrons to understand gas phase reactions. Through highly repetitive
experiments, seemingly random results combine to reveal patterns. These patterns give insight into reaction dynamics in our atmosphere and even outer space. In my studio I use sculpture, prints, and digital media to make the invisible phenomena studied in the lab more accessible. By using a weighted random sampling of distributions that match experimental results, I generate the coordinates of points in each sculpture. The same coordinates are transferred into 3D modeling software, where I create digital animations as well as models for 3D printed blocks for relief prints. Through multiple forms of visualization, my work seeks to reveal the quantum mechanics of reactions and the techniques used to study them.
Carla Aspenberg
The submitted work is an experimental softground etching of feathers overlaid with a photo litho transfer of concentric circles. The concentric circles denote a vanishing point in the center of the page, alluding to invisible forces converging in an implied linear perspective. In many of my pieces I use lines and circular shapes to symbolize qualities of light. In all my work I try to find new ways of perceiving simple shapes and patterns. I’m trying to show new ways of seeing the unassuming imagery found in our daily lives. Several years ago on a long drive across the United States I encountered a brief view of sunlight pouring around me, streaming perfectly through many soft clouds as I crossed the continental divide in the middle of the country. This fleeting scene ignited a desire in me to create works inspired by everyday transcendental moments.
Raymond Bonavida
Moondance is a photography series which asks us to reimagine our Moon. It explores the boundaries between the familiar and the unfamiliar, blurring the line between reality and fantasy. At the root of each image is a unique moon illumination and derived from this real reference is an interpretive composition of dynamic
movement. Images are each captured organically, with a handheld camera, in single exposures lasting a few seconds. Simplicity of the subject and a stark black and white palette set the stage for a surprising amount of complexity. My approach to the series is informed by my background in philosophy and psychology in which I have a particular interest in the underlying mechanisms of human perception and cognition. The series is also an effort to increase attention towards our Moon and its emerging role as a gateway to space exploration. As the space narrative evolves, so must our imagination.
Michael Winters
These photographs, sometimes combined with simple drawings or hole-punches, pay attention to the act of seeing itself. Here, the grid is a metaphor for worldview. Does our “grid” help us see reality, or does it get in the way of seeing clearly?
Kaitlin Merchant
Atmospheric Perspective. Crisp in the foreground and hazy in the distance. Much like our journey through life. Physically, the level of clarity in the distance depends on the weather. Metaphorically, on our state of mind. The act of traveling broadens our perspective and provides new concepts, or shortcuts for meaning. These new points of reference change the way we process information, experiences, and emotions. The more concepts, the richer our ability to reflect and relate. The point of view from an airplane window signals the change in internal perspective we can acquire through a change in physical perspective.
Emily Wilker
My work is inspired by forces of nature whether it be a gust of wind, the smell of the ocean air or the digging up of dirt with my hands. I make paintings about the sensorial experience of being alone in nature. Surfaces are scratched, carved, layered, and peeled back again, built up of heavy, gunky material such as sandy crusted paint, homemade wood clay, and acrylic mediums of various viscosities and flows; paint is blended and fluffed on with a brush, and in other spaces applied in a squiggle or line straight from the tube. Marked through a steadfast motion, the pigment begins to optically mix shades of red, blue, pink and green foraging images of pondering waters, cascading rivers, New England wetlands and entangled woods. By using perspective as a tool, I invite the spectator to position themselves within the work, allowing them to imagine themselves as part of the moment being depicted. I’m dedicated to studying the dissolve of figure and ground, human-in-nature, an atom.
Nick Gripp
Through a style of loose abstraction I produce oil paintings of landscapes. Working from remembered vistas, I depict the natural world from a subjective perspective to emphasize thoughts and feelings as opposed to physical reality. With a thorough study of painterly paintings, I use formal concerns like color and brushwork to anchor featherweight thoughts and feelings. Including the oppressive sky hanging over our heads. The air above the landscape holds all the weight of the painting. The brushwork is expressive and layered to give compositions depth and a sense of a low level buzzing. Creating paintings in plein air gives me the freedom from abrasive chemical smells and nosey neighbors alike.
Arthur Koch
Atmospheric Perspective has been a constant theme throughout my work, especially landscape painting, but also photography. I just love how values and color can push and pull objects forward or fade off into the distance. I also enjoy plein air painting because it gives me a chance to be outside observing nature. The California coast if often foggy so the diffusion of light makes for an interesting play between foreground objects that have contrast and color saturation and the background colors fading off in the distance with bluer less saturated colors and less contrast.
Mark Dierker
I’ve always been interested in studying light, particularly the way it causes the intersection of sky and land to behave. Most of us are powerless to shoot the landscape the way Ansel Adams did. Our modern digital cameras simply don’t have the power to record that kind of depth of field where nearly everything is in focus. So we are left with trying to capture the poetry of the landscape with the elements we can control. The light, distance, color and perspective which combine to make our photographs into art. The combination of fading light and atmospheric perspective create an almost liquid horizon as all the hard edges that provide contrast disappear.
Michael E Stern
My fondness for Hiroshi Sugimoto’s black and white tonal work inspired me to create a series of photographs that reinterpret the role of light and dark tones in traditional black and white landscape photography. The
tonal arrangement commonly found is dark foregrounds and light backgrounds. This is due to atmospheric interference that light travels through before it reaches the camera’s recording surface. The closer the subject is to the camera, the less interference there is allowing rich and dark tones to record as they are. Deeper into the photograph and again due to atmospheric interference, the tones are much lighter and less distinct. For me, inverting this relationship produces work that appears to be birthing out of Mother Earth herself, the beginning of life.
Michael Baum
My studio practice investigates the complex relationship between nature and human beings through printmaking processes and artists’ books. The work I create is influenced by various outdoor pursuits, ranging from backcountry ski tours to extended wilderness treks and cycling tours. These approaches engage the human body as a vehicle for expression while exploring ways nature and the landscape can potentially influence me both visually and physically. The most recent series of silk-screen printed images focus on confronting the boundaries of both physical and existential delineation, examining those places along the margins of society and our psyche. The final mechanically reproduced work suggests these transformations are subjectively influenced through reframing of experience.
Michelle Paine
These images of medieval Italian passageways are symbols of memory, looking back towards the past. They are personal memories of Italy, but also represent cultural and religious memory. Beyond the darkness of this
archway, in the light beyond memory, are moments of light which guided me along the way. What is behind us in the past becomes less clear as memory and time begin to interfere, just like the atmospheric perspective from a mountaintop. The arches also became a metaphor for looking forward — to something I am only sometimes able to glimpse. In this dark moment I catch sight of a future that I have not yet seen but I have faith exists. It is unclear, hazy with years which have not yet come. Like the structures that inspired them, my paintings are layered, image covering image, sometimes sanded or scraped away. The painting itself becomes a palimpsest of history like the ancient buildings, addressing the tension between the permanent and the passing.
Nancey Price
In developing her work, Nancy’s mission is to explore how it feels to experience life in a Black body and what it looks like to exalt and celebrate that Blackness from the fields of rural America to the stars in the night sky. A daughter of the South and a lover of the outdoors, Nancey often employs elements of nature in her work, which is evident in her collages, Spiraling #1 and Untitled .
Spiraling #1 is a meditation on the interconnectedness of land and space; the heavens and the earth. A horizon of sorts, this collage invites observers to lean in and ponder the significance of our place in the Universe and how as much as we are observers of the natural world, we are also of the natural world. As Spiraling #1 implores observers to ponder our place in the natural world, Untitled asks observers to ruminate on our impact on the world around us, and how our actions can cause irreversible damage. This collage accompanied the This Land column of the February/March issue of Garden&Gun Magazine in which its writer, Latria Graham, discusses the loss of Florida’s oldest tree, named the Senator, due to human negligence.
Britt Sondreal
These images are from Already/Not Yet, an ongoing exploration of the liminal spaces and scenes of dusk. I began the series because I was specifically drawn to the summer light at sundown, which creates a very particular atmosphere enveloped in shades of blue. This light lends an ephemeral quality to the world that both illuminates and obscures. It is a time of transition and transformation, when the familiar becomes the unexpected and new possibilities are revealed. At dusk, we are already dreaming, not yet asleep.
Thomas Crawford
My aerial landscapes provide unsentimental views of America in the early 21st century: “under construction” shows homes accumulating around a partially completed shopping center; “embedded” depicts four trailer parks surrounded by more orderly residential housing. I reconfigured satellite photos with Photoshop to create landscapes that don’t quite feel right. Note the unnatural symmetry in “under construction” with the left side recurring in a slightly altered mirror image on the right. The orderly streets outside the trailer parks in “embedded” contrast markedly with the chaotic, even shape-shifting streets inside. Once printed on paper, I folded the images into evenly distributed zig-zag ridges. These folds invite viewers to look at the landscapes from multiple perspectives. These aerial images (literally from an atmospheric perspective) invite us to contemplate how urban communities are created and organized in America today.
Eduardo Valdes
I see abundance, mystery, and beauty in the visual complexity of natural forms. My goal is to allow my art to emerge due to the combined impact of scientific observation and subjective experience. The final result
is a poetic interpretation. The works are painted from life or based on drawings and paintings made from observation. I take no photographs since I care only about what my eye sees and how to manipulate the paint to document my understanding. In “Tranquility,” a value sequence moving from a dark foreground to a light background suggests vast space induced by the atmosphere. The illusion of depth is further enhanced by the accompanying hue temperature sequence from warm green to colder blue-green to icy blue. The limited palette creates a luminous quality by helping maintain a unified, pervasive sense of an enveloping light. The painting’s small scale demonstrates the work’s size is not essential to create the illusion of deep space.
Peter Cullum
Atmospheric Perspective implies distance. To be distanced from something is an opportunity to consider it anew. During the lockdown, I began to make images that attempt to embody my feelings about nature. Normal processes and natural rhythms are now shifted from the familiar to the bizarre. What will nature get up to when it no longer has the burden of being observed? Here, a tree sheds its wood components in the fall, leaving a canopy of leaves floating in the air.
Gregory Lookerse
Greg Lookerse is an interdisciplinary artist, author and educator based in West Michigan. Lookerse makes mixed media drawings, installations and performances that question the nature of sacred objects. “The studio is a wrestling ring. I see something holy, an icon, temple architecture, or religious practices, and I cannot understand why these things are sacred instead of mundane. In order to understand them, I have to dissect
them, rearrange them, often finding something new.” The work submitted is part of a series of multimedia explorations of stones. Responding to the Biblical metaphors of stones and their solidity, Lookerse examines the metamorphic nature of stones. This diptych places translucent “atmospheric” stones in a field of gold. The gold extends below the transparent formations rather than filling the space above. The stones sit in a milieu with each other and the materials of the drawings themselves.
Gigi Florek
This piece is part of a larger body of work that explores topics concerning chronic illness and mental health. The blue abled hands race across the canvas with not a care in the world. The red disabled hands crawl their way through the mud just to glimpse the life of the blue. The red hand works tirelessly but can’t reach the height of the blue. A single blue hand stops, notices, and in the whirlwind, offers assistance. A friendly hand reaches down to help. A connection to be made, both sacrifice and liberation.
Curators Note: While the artist’s conception of this image seems adjacent to the theme of this show, the imagery immediately drew me into musing about the interconnection between the well being of the earth, and the well being ourselves. The personification of earth and atmosphere as human hands with both active ignorance and generosity pulls at the way humanity and the natural world are inextricably linked and pleads for us to stop and consider and extend the “sacrifices” necessary to support the liberation of our land and in turn ourselves.
