The MANaged Landscape

Increasingly, what we call nature is less and less what we mean when we say that word.  Nature implies non-human, animals and plants living out their lives away from human civilization.  But except for a few corners of the world where we have not yet decided to go, nature is increasingly a creation of man.  In some cases our "natural" areas are the result of human intervention in the past, such as the young forests that blanket the east coast where almost all available land was cleared for farmland.  The woods and wildlife that have returned seem grand to our eyes, but they are scraggly and ragged shadows of what they once were.


On the other hand we have the great parks of the west, some of them much as they were hundreds of year ago; land that was either too rugged or remote for settlers to clear.  But in our efforts to maintain this wilderness we have focused on the goal of maintaining it as it was.  Invasive species are removed, water and timber are carefully monitored, and the landscape is carefully preserved, like a huge interactive diorama.  They are not quite the living, breathing, wilderness that we want them to be, but instead a museum of flora and fauna, stopped in time at an arbitrary date.


None of this is bad or wrong.  Plants and animals continue to live and flourish in all types of landscapes, urban, managed or otherwise.  Nature, for lack of a better world, allows for whatever species has the right mix of luck and genetics to thrive in any ecosystem.  But we continue to present to ourselves the false narrative of what nature is.  We idealize it, glorify it, ignore it, define and redefine it to fit our needs.  Once upon a time the conservative rural farmers of the south were the environmentalists, now the hip suburbanite liberals are the environmentalists; the workings of "nature" remain the same, the story we tell ourselves about it changes.


With this in mind I am starting a new project, tentatively called "The MANaged Landscape".  I first worked on a version of it with some of my students.  Recognizing that nature is a figment, a story, we created our own landscape is a little red wagon.  We collected rocks, vegetation and other materials and formed it in a way that was pleasing to us.  We then used it to inspire photographs and paintings which in themselves were figments and interpretations.  In my studio these landscapes will sprout man made objects as well as natural ones, videos, photographs, digital collages, paintings and who knows what else.  


When you start with a fiction, and create more fictions based on it, who is to say where the truth lies?