The Dedee Shattuck Gallery presents Fields of Visions

The Dedee Shattuck Gallery presents Fields of Visions, work by photographers Millee Tibbs, Carsten Meier and Jimmy Fike.

The genre of landscape in art and photography has long been associated with the romantic tradition — an approach that translates the forms of nature into symbols for the artist’s emotional state while propagating mythic ideals of gender and conquest. A symbolic language around this aesthetic emerged over the years, one that converted the environment into an emotional register — its most common forms being landscape as beautiful, pastoral, sublime or menacing. The usage of appearance (landscape) over process (ecology) in art made the genre easily co-optable by the tourist industry and marketed to suburbanites. As environmental degradation increased and the environmental movement formed, it became obvious that the Romantic approach was reaching its limits. In postmodernism, this trajectory reached its nadir in landscape-as-kitsch (calendars, mouse pads, posters, Bob Ross, scenic views with signage, etc.).

Out of these ashes the inverse emerged, as photographers in the New Topograhics worked with a decidedly non-romantic eye. These ironic existentialists saw the fatalism, the cracks in the mythology and insurmountable encroachment of development into wild spaces, documenting it with an unflinching deadpan. While the work served as important reality check and opened up a space for critical theory that deconstructed the relationship between patriarchy, psychology, capitalism, colonialism and landscape its aesthetic of alienation and implicit belief in photography as window to the world seems incomplete – this is where the photographers on display pick up the baton.

The artists in Fields of Visions have eschewed both the overly sentimental, highly aestheticized nature of the romantic tradition and the detached fatalism of the New Topograhics. Hoping to create a contemporary type of landscape photography that incorporates ecology, complex systems of digitized sight and dissemination, heightened perception, theoretical critic of orthodoxy within the genre, and influences from socially engaged practice. Tibbs, Meier, and Fike each bring a unique vision and approach but are bound by a common desire to see landscape reinvigorated and each uses layered systems of photographic presentation to achieve these ends. By layering information on top of images each present a multifaceted interface that extends photography into new realms of discourse and invites new forms of perception.

Fields of Visions will be on display May 2 to 27 at Dedee Shattuck Gallery, 1 Partners Lane, off 865 Main Road, Westport. The opening reception will be held Saturday, May 5, from 5 to 7 p.m. For additional information, visit www.dedeeshattuckgallery.com.