The Mind Is Also A Landscape

The Mind Is Also A Landscape presents the work of 9 contemporary artists currently living and working in the United States whose practices encompass photography, painting, sculpture, film-making and writing.

Among the group, several artists produce work that is discernably influenced by or produced in consort with the natural world, while for others that relationship is less direct. What is shared is the impulse to be drawn out from the familiar interior of the studio into a more free, less personal landscape of the natural world, and to be receptive to its surprises and liberations. Artists included in this exhibition are Cody Hoyt, Beverly Acha, Angelina Gualdoni, Alex Lukas, Paul Wackers, Annie May Johnston, JJ Manford, Natani Notah, and Chase Wilson.

From each artist, a personal photograph is presented from a period of ‘free time’ spent in the outdoors, not engaged in the act of ‘making’ or ‘doing’ art but in receptive exploration. Reproduced in large format, single-color silkscreen prints, these images create their own fragmented panorama built of collective creative experiences undertaken in disparate locations and from within the lives of artists with enormously varied practices.

This grouping of prints are in many instances quite visually removed from the artists’ broader studio production but instead their imagery embodies time spent outside of the studio; time spent hiking, foraging, time spent in the natural realm of the senses and by extension, time spent understanding one’s body in relation to the world.

Public Land was established with a commitment to sharing the work of artists who explore and re-imagine the ways we experience, interact and perceive our natural environment. “The Mind Is Also A Landscape” proposes a broadening of that idea by considering how the natural environment influences artists in immeasurable ways, whether or not the specific imagery of those experiences remains present in the work.