Statement from the artist:
The exhibition includes drawing, photography and a video installation. It is an interpretation of the landscape genre, here at the ghost end of Romanticism.
The images counter a pictorial vanishing point with the intimate entropy of a horizontal plane. Rather than objectifying as other and thereby historicizing “Nature,” they entangle mythic with mundane, a sublime of limits.
In the series Portraits, the skyscape overhead is overlaid with a charcoal rubbing of the ground beneath. The diptych Fire at Sea, a reference to Turner, captures a flat screen laid face up on the ground, ablaze in a spectacle of wreck and fire and sprayed with a hose. Idaho presents a still shot of the open desert. The eponymous Idaho potato rolls across the horizon line and screen in that same flatbed orientation. The potato exits and re-emerges in time with an implicit loop around the gallery. The work conflates the landscape genre with portrait, media spectacle, and institutional architecture in turn. We inhabit the very environmental crisis we fail to see.
-Stephanie Washburn
Stephanie Washburn received her BA from Wesleyan University and her MFA from the UC Santa Barbara. Recent exhibitions include Fellows for Contemporary Art (CA), Davidson Art Center (CT) and ACME Gallery (CA). Her work has been reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, New American Paintings and Huffington Post. It has been acquired by Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA) and Sweeney Art Gallery at UC Riverside (CA). Washburn lives in Ojai, CA and is a Lecturer at UCSB.
