Five Artists Who Work with Landscape

Toshio Shibata is a mid-career Japanese photographer who photographs man-made and natural patterns in nature. Using a 8 x 10 in camera, Toshio crops his photos so that references to scale and placement are eliminated. He has had solo exhibits at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

with your water falling over our new natural. Acrylic, found foam, eurocast, moss, mylar, paper, pencil, pen, pentag, plastic bag, sage, sedum, sponge, wood. 26 x 24 x 10 in. 2010.

warmth gave rise to our falling. Acrylic, baby's breath, eurocast, fern, hair, hosta, moss, paper, sedum, sagebush, wood.
24 x 24 x 13. 2011

Gregory Euclide distorts, transforms, and reconstructs traditional landscape paintings into 3D models that bring the painting to life. The canvas seems to bend off the wall, rivers run off the painting, and miniature trees sprout from surfaces. Gregory has had solo exhibits around the US including several art fairs in Miami, was featured in a 2007 Midwestern edition of New American Painting, and has a painting featured as album art for Bon Iver's forthcoming album.  He is a high school art teacher in Minnesota and graduated with a degree in studio art and art education in 1997, receiving a MFA in 2008.

Wooly Magma. Inkjet print. 12.25 x 12.25 in. 2010.

Mossy Retreat. Inkjet print. 12.25 x 16.5 in. 2010.

Eszter Burghardt constructs miniature dioramas out of everyday materials like cotton, wool, cake, coffee, and milk. Since graduating from Emily Carr University in 2001, she has taken part in a number of residencies in Iceland. Eszter is inspired by the remote landscape and epic and vast vistas of Iceland. Her work plays with scale and expectations.

Various locations. 2010.

Various locations. 2010.

Filippo Minelli is a Italian conceptual artist who often works with themes like nationality, identity, globalization, technology, and advertising. He works in the public sphere, creating situations about contrast that causes the viewer to question their surroundings. In this body of work, he abstracts a landscape with surreal, colored plumes of smoke and then captures the fleeting nature of the smoke with photography. He received his BFA in 2006 and exhibits mostly in Italy.

On Avenue B along Tompkins Square Park.

Momo tags width of Manhattan

Momo is a NY-based graffiti artist who has been making street art for the past thirteen years. In one of his projects, he tagged the entire width of of Manhattan. Created in 2006, the piece is more than eight miles long. To create the piece, Momo attached a funnel-shaped bucket of paint with a hose and ball valve to the back of his bike and rode about NY in the middle of the night. Like many other graffiti artists, Momo's work is about the public vs. private sphere, the commercial aspect of art, and media and advertising. 

Rainbows: Jonathan Whitfill, Gabriel Dawe & Katharina Grosse

Jonathan Whitfill is a sculptor and performance artist based out of Texas. In his sculptures, he often uses found objects. Jonathan has exhibited extensively in Texas and is also a high school chemistry teacher.  

pleuxus no. 3, gutermann thread, wood and nails, installation at guerillaarts, 12 x 6 x 16 ft, 2010 

Gabriel Dawe is currently a graduate student at University of Texas at Dallas. Born in Mexico City, Gabriel views his interest in fibers as subversive because the associated traditions can be interpreted as strictly feminine. 

One Floor Up, 2010

Katharina Grosse's installation at MassMOCA is on display until October 31, 2011. Her work plays with breaking the confines of space in a gallery. For example, in this piece she distorts the white gallery walls and liberates the painting from the walls to the floor. Katharina is from Germany and has a brilliantly confusing website.

I like the instant gratification of these images; rainbows are cool to look at. A couple of days ago I was looking at the work of artists who participated in the 2010 Skowhegan residency, which an influential residency awarded to emerging artists working in a range of media. I was surprised by how conceptual, high brow, and self-absorbed much of the artwork was. Maybe it's just me, but I had a difficult time understanding what many of the artists were trying to say. Or what they were doing didn't translate well through their website.

Dislocation: Evelyn Rydz & Do Ho Suh

These two artists explore the effects of global movement and relocation.

Detail from Drifting Islands #3,  pencil, colored pencil, and acrylic on 2 sheets of Duralar, 21 x 32 in, 2009

084523, pencil and colored pencil on Duralar, 11 x 14 in, 2010

Evelyn Rydz was a finalist in the 2010 James and Aubrey Foster Prize, which is a biennial award and exhibition program sponsored by the ICA and given to a selection of Boston-area artists. She received her BFA from Florida State University and MFA. from SMFA. Evelyn teaches in the Studio Foundation Department at MassArt and has been involved with community art projects at the ICA and MFA. The two images above were featured in an interview with Evelyn that can be seen on New American Painting's blog.

In her extremely detailed drawings, Evelyn documents objects that have been washed ashore onto shorelines around the world, from Lima and Miami to Rio De Janeiro and Boston. She is interested in "the stories they tell of relocation, transformation, and all the events that might have made them castaways in these foreign landscapes" (New American Painting). Evelyn relates this idea of dislocation to her personal history: the past three generations of her family have come from different countries.  The found objects are metaphors for how people adapt, move, and relocate and how they collect experiences and memories as they move to new places.

Bridging Home, mixed media outdoor installation, 2010
Commissioned for 2010 Liverpool Biennial  

Part Two:Reflection, nylon and stainless steel tube, dimensions variable, 2004.
Displayed at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in NY

Art 21 artist Do Ho Suh received his BFA and MFA from Seoul National University and has studied at RISD and Yale. He has exhibited at Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Serpentine Gallery (London), and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City).

Like Evelyn Rydz, Do Ho works with the ideas of dislocation, adaptation, and assimilation. He was born in South Korea, moved to the US for school, and currently divides his times between the two countries. His work comes from the tension of not feeling a true sense of belonging to either country. Earlier in his career, Do Ho created portable life-size models of his various homes, including his childhood home in Korea. The fabric tent-like structures can folded and carried around. As a result, Do Ho is never separated from the memories and culture of one part of his divided existence. Currently, he is creating installations in which houses are surreally dropped into locations that they do not belong, in a very Wizard of Oz-y type of way (like in the first image). Do Ho uses representations of Korean houses as a symbol of his cultural heritage then places the houses internationally.