2022 Terraforms
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One of science fiction’s best known plot devices is the idea of planetary terraforming. The term coined by Jack Williamson in a 1942 short story, Collision Orbit, posits a hypothetical art of engineering Earth-like biospheres on lifeless planets. Despite its improbability, popular media speculation on colonizing Mars suggests that the prospect of human engineered climate disaster has only fueled cultural fantasies of replicating Earth elsewhere. In this contemporary context, the trope of the terraformed landscape tells paradoxical stories of both environmental creation and destruction, the triumph of technology and the very real limits of industrial modernity.
Terraforms engages this recurring dream of artificially engineered “Earths” through a series of abstract visual experiments. As conceptual “terraforms” each work in this series approaches abstract painting as a process of topographical modeling that rarely conforms to planned designs. Terraforms also captures a particular view of the artistic process as a complex alchemy of transmutations shaping both maker and medium.
Inspired by the rocky foothills, lakes and forests of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, these works exhibit dense textures, fluid organic forms and layers of color. Color and shapes articulate pictorial space hinting at familiar Earth terrains that might also be alien worlds. Emphasizing process over representation, these projects draw forth tensions between the familiar and the strange, organic and artificial implicated in cultural discourses on terraformed environments.
June 2022