FOR 5/23

‘BADLANDS: NEW HORIZONS IN LANDSCAPE’ WILL OPEN MAY 25 AT MASS MOCA

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NORTH ADAMS, MASS. — The tradition of portraying the landscape has threaded together movements as varied as the mid-Nineteenth Century Hudson River School and the Earth Art of the 1960s and 1970s. “Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape,” opening Sunday, May 25, at Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) presents the next chapter in the landscape tradition, addressing contemporary ideas of exploration, population of the wilderness, land usage, environmental politics and the relativity of aesthetic beauty.

“Badlands” comes at a time when the world is more ecologically aware yet more in need of solutions than ever before. The artists in this exhibition share this collective anxiety — some turn to the past to see how their predecessors negotiated the terrain of the landscape while some propose entirely new ideas. While deeply aware of the legacy of the landscape, each of these artists reinvents the genre to produce works that look beyond vast beauty to address current environmental issues.

The exhibition will include five new commissions including work from Vaughn Bell, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Joe Smolinski, Nina Katchadourian and Mary Temple. Several artists contributing new works never before exhibited, include Paul Jacobsen, Alexis Rockman and Jane Marsching.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a color catalog published by MIT Press.

Some of the artists in the exhibition both develop and reinterpret traditional genres of landscape depiction. Robert Adams helped found the genre referred to as “New Topographics,” which focuses on a non-idealized view of the American Landscape. At first glance, his black and white images of Colorado immediately invited comparison to Ansel Adams but Robert Adams takes a contrary approach, making small images of ordinary or even ugly landscapes seem sublime.

Ed Ruscha reinvents the traditional awe-inspiring landscape in his “Country Cityscapes” series in which he takes calendarlike panoramas and cuts away sections to the prints, filling the voids with text (phrases like “it’s payback time” and “You will eat hot lead”). Known for his ironic perspective on American vernacular imagery, Ruscha allows the landscape to talk back, this time with a stereotypical Wild West twang.

Some of the artists venture out into the world examining the landscape from both macro and micro viewpoints. Mike Glier’s project “Latitude, Longitude and Antipodes” targets specific locations on the globe to create a series of plein air improvisational paintings.

Jane Marsching travels even further afield — and into the future — with “Arctic Listening Post (2006–present),” an interdisciplinary multimedia project that deals with historic impressions of the Arctic and how one can imagine a future there.

Another group of artists addresses both natural and man-made disasters and how they affect the land and its inhabitants. Leila Daw’s large-scale paintings deal with floods and volcanoes and how they impact both the landscape and civilization; in her work the constructed environment is always being wiped out as a lesson to the interlopers. Melissa Brown and J. Henry Fair deal more directly with the beauty of a declining landscape.

Mass MoCA is a restored Nineteenth Century factory campus. For more information, www.massmoca.org or 413-662-2111.