The Impossible Landscape brings together the work of eight artists who, in different ways, have been thinking about conventions of landscape art and botanical depiction. Each artist complicates the question of what it means to make a landscape image now and their work suggests that traditional modes of depiction are impossible. The idea of impossibility permeates the various projects in other ways too.
The exhibition clearly conjures many ideas and many kinds of impossibility. Wide-ranging in their mediums and forms, the wors assembled may produce equally diverse responses. One might feel exhilarated to see brand new forms of landscape depiction, or frustrated by the ways in which typical landscape images are carefully withheld. Some artists deliberately try to confuse one's sense of the status of the presented image; others shun traditional depictions yet, despite setting themselves prohibitions, produce poetic and even humorous work. The exhibition as a whole might be another landscape: no one response, no one reading of its tile will be possible.
The Impossible Landscape is co-curated by Mark Godfrey (UK) and Jodie Vicenta Jaconbson (NYC). Mark Godfrey is a Lecturer at the Slade School of Fine ARt, University College London. Jodie Vicenta Jacobson is the Curator for The Horticultural Society of New York and an artist working in photography and video.
The Horticultural Society of New York
British Council