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4/1/2002

Lateral Landscapes

Raid Projects, Los Angeles

David Grant
Julia Latane
Kristi Lippire
Jared Pankin

January 5-26, 2002

Opening Reception is on Saturday, January 5, 2002, 7-10 pm

Lateral Landscapes
Curators' Statement

An interesting thing came up in the curating process for this show. Thinking of 'landscape' as an area of practice it became apparent that there were several semantic problems in what was actually being addressed with this term. Checking with Webster's Dictionary related 'a painting or photograph of a piece of inland scenery'. This left sculpture in a somewhat disconcerting predicament which seemed worth pursuing.

In what ways does contemporary sculpture deal with 'landscape'? What we are actually discussing here is perhaps a surrogate term for nature, seperated from the urban environment or cityscape. This show brings together 4 artists whose work's highlight two fundamental issues of importance to our understanding of the relationship between us, as 21st century city dwellers, and the mental structure we call landscape/nature.

Two major aspects come immediately to mind. Firstly, is the essentially divorced life of this interaction. Landscape/nature is a conceptualized space that reflects us rather than a basically mythical location. It is an idea, a generalization and a cliche. To engage with it is to address ideologies and modes of representation. These artists deal with nature, via landscape, not as the traditional notion of the natural, but as 'the essential character of something' (Websters) while remaining completely aware of the difficulties with the linguistic problems contained in that word 'essential', with it's perceptual, semantic, cultural and historic perogatives.

This seperation is the logical outcome of capital industrialization of the world we live in. We are, in any real terms, irrevocably distanced from this landscape/nature. Of course I am talking about those of us, the vast majority, who live in constant urban interaction. Even those of us who hike and camp tend to drive there with store bought , prepackaged supplies, with the requisite cell phone, just in case. We experience all of this, at best, as "that way over there" and at worst, entirely as the mediated and commodified image on the screen. It is unknowable, the true Other.

The traditional artistic relationship with this concept is mostly a romantic ideal of Utopian Oneness (truely a no-place) and a desire for the Sublime. These 4 artists reestablish a pragmatic dialogue with how we understand the terms, reformulating the problem to find new avenues of thought, hence lateral. The very materials, plasticity and hand-madeness of these works act as a signifier for the artificiality of this relationship.

The second issue is that of location/distance/scale , bunched together because they are inherently entwined in our relationship to this subject. Sculpture is often found IN the landscape but is rarely engaged directly with what it might BE. Our viewing placement is critical. Landscape is a THERE., a location unspecified in these works, while placing us within a physical space and interaction where distance and scale cannot be ignored and is crucial to our reading. Each artist may deal with it differently so that our 'location' of perception is altered but they all trade in the same discourse, albeit from dramatically divergent standpoints.

David Grant interupts the traditional horizontality of this while reinforcing the notion of distance as an inherent part of this perception. His methodology of construction recounts lunar structures( the ultimate in unaided visual possibilities) as well as aerial and agricultural topographies. At the opposite end of this scale Julia Latane refers to bamboo, again in materials which accentuate the non-natural. Walking around the 'bamboo field' forces the participant to recognise a sharp scale change where we are within but not of. A kind of ironic Sublime plays with both artists work and the placement spatially between them reinforces this scale change of HERE and THERE, a negotiated movement in space.

Kristi Lippire takes landscape as a conceptualized space where a dichotomy of real and false is resonating somewhere inbetween. Landscaping or landscape? The objecthood is akin to the relationship that might occur from photography to Photoshop perhaps. There is a sense of replication which also exists in Jared Pankin's work. His simulcrum only heightens one's awareness of the falsity of this relationship we have. Again we find our physical placement and movement of extreme relevence to our experience.

These artists track terrains of divergent sculptural practice while dealing with very similar issues in a subtle nexus of the psychological, cultural, semantic and physical.
Max Presneill

Raid Projects is an artist-run non-profit curatorial organization. We are dedicated to promoting an exchange of cultural production and discussion through various exhibition models on a regional, national and international basis by emerging and established contemporary artists.

We host 12 projects per year in the gallery in Los Angeles and 6-8 projects per year in external alternative, commercial, institutional, and/or appropriated spaces world-wide. These projects encompass all areas of contemporary practice, including painting, sculpture, film, new media, digital, and performance.

Ed Giardina
9322 Litchfield
Huntington Beach, CA 92646, USA
Studio: 714-965-0523
Fax: 714-848-9004

Raid Projects
602 Moulton Los Angeles, CA 90031
T: 323.441.9593

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