THE WARMING LANDSCAPE

The Bruise invited five artists to interpret the Warming Landscape.
What does one infer from directly or indirectly interacting with the landscape about the personal affects, the alterations of body and mind? What is our direct relationship to something that seems less and less natural to us? How do we respectfully commune with nature in this day of controlled and artificial environments. Have we stopped caring? Does the landscape mean anything to us at this point in time? Is this process of care left only to the experts, the environmental agents? The ideas we share about the landscape are varied.

For most of us it seems detached, divorced from our everyday experience. We visit the landscape, but are not intimate on a daily basis. We drive to work, walk from the parking lot to the front door, and spend the entire day nestled in our workplace or sedate home. Recently, the landscape as viewed by the media is in great peril. Our consumption and wasteful lifestyles seem to be altering the environment at rapid speed, with the threat of melting ice caps, and the potential elimination of one half the earth's species, we are undeniably paying a large price for such "common luxuries". In the realm of the psyche, the landscape is also often thought of as a particular perspective, mainly horizontal. The personal, interior or abstract landscapes attempt to intentionally lure the viewer toward the emotive. We as viewer may enter, perhaps reluctantly, trespassing through psychic gardens, tangential mountains, the peripheral lines of thought, and/or other mysterious personal ephemera. So, it is with great pride we here at the bruise present to you dear visitor, our inaugural exhibition with the following outstanding contributing artists.

Thanks to all. Enjoy

KRISTA CONNERLY

Landscapes frequently propose and instigate the non-rational in me. The landscape itself becomes a non-rational being. It has emotional processes that move themselves as natural forces. These forces can sometimes enter me, setting off my own series of bodily responses. Sometimes the landscape seems interested in exhibiting the potential to overtake me physically as is the case with sunburn, freezing, and drowning. This is one of its forms of intimacy. It can penetrate you. In less dramatic cases you form a relationship through adaptation. A new territory, as you move across it, changes your situation. Often you will need to calibrate the internal to the external.

Forest Research is an open-ended research project consisting of images and interactive animations that explore the forest as mental territory. Specifically, it looks at the idea of the Black Forest and it's corresponding language of fairytales. The stories that have grown out of this landscape seem to point to the calibration of internal to external. For instance, swallowing the heart of a bird creates a kind of physical alchemy during sleep that makes gold appear under your pillow. Fairy tales are filled with transformations like these and these activities are born out of the place itself; the forest as a density of desires and fears. Negotiations of its tangles and complications cause internal shifts. Its presence and power saturate its visitors, forcing its outer movements and representations to be taken inside.

MARK SHEPHERD

Cataclysmic Junk Observations. It is common knowledge that we Americans are wasteful hungry consumers. We excessively take from the natural resources with little thought to sustainability and to the well-being of future citizens of the planet. Global warming is becoming a fact, not fiction. Oddly enough, wIthin what some consider gloom and doom hyperbole our immediate landscape is filled with awkwardly beautiful deteriorating, neglected and rotted debris. Plastic flowers decorate a midwestern lawn, Christmas trees await their final resting place in a giant recycling bin, garishly painted cement animals stare blankly at the innocuous passerby, worn-out gas station maps that lead to nowhere, and plant life struggling to survive the encroaching cement and choked air. It all has me simultaneously visually captivated and emotionally distraught about the future of the planet. There seems to me a lot of visible signs of waste that recycling alone will not provide a solution. We must begin to rethink our lifestyles, again, and again.

ELIZABETH HUEY

Elizabeth Huey’s work enacts a prismatic understanding of the individual as a contracted cultivation of institutional endeavors. Huey addresses the hapless, blessed, but oftentimes ambiguous role cultural affects and practices play as mitigations on our interactive selves. Emotions and cognitions, desires and delusions, tempered by societal visions of order —religious, governmental, architectural, and medical— represent her chosen subject matter.
In Huey’s paintings, individuals in need become ossified artifacts through the orchestrations of forces both in and far beyond their private jurisdictions.

LAUREN GIBBES

Media has become an abstraction of imagery, layers of meaning and color. Living in a visually marketed world, we are conditioned to accept images without consideration. A meditative loss of recognition and awareness leads to the diffusion of the image; only color and ambient shifts remain. From this massive influx of information I construct my own visual allegories. I draw my imagery from a mixture of television, magazine, and internet sources. Through the use and manipulation of appropriated imagery and found objects I make an effort to blur the lines between the collective and individual experience. My work creates new meaning and narrative with the deconstruction and juxtaposition of various elements. I confront systems of power, cultural issues, gender roles, commercialism, and media, reviving conceptual value.

ROBERTO CALBUCCI / GRAPHIKLAND

awakin' cells machine
premature optimization is like the candidate for assassination:
precautions have pretty much eliminated his risks
precautions have pretty much compressed his movements bandaged stone
ex-body
ex-nature
ex-artlife death and embalmment
embalmment is a way of preserving death through the simulation of life

HOLLIS BROWN THRONTON

If my work does something specific, I would like it to constantly emphasize the temporal, passing moment. This can be something that just happened or something that happened long ago and only remains as fragments made up of memories or photographs. I think I am defined more so by a collection of constantly passing events, both present and past, than most anything else. I often place the whale skeletons on dry land, emphasizing that this land was not dry at one point and may one day be under water again.

From our current perspective, the land is dry. It is like the sun setting, it doesn't’t really set, but only looks that way because of our perspective. Or when a goldfish sees you walk past the fishbowl and you distort in shape when you hit a certain point of the bowl’s curve, the distortion doesn't’t really happen, but the goldfish will never know.