Landscape Trauma in the Age of Scopophilia

Landscape Trauma featured newly commissioned and existing works in photography, digital media, collage and video installation by artists and computer programmers who rejuvenated and expanded the subject of landscape. In this exhibition, the familiar picture plane was disrupted, compressed and destabilised, to create extraordinary illusions, which fluctuated between abstraction and representation, and which drew attention to the viewer’s relationship to the spectacle. Landscape Trauma was influenced by Norman Bryson’s essay ‘The Gaze in the Expanded Field’ which questioned the Cartesian model for looking, and in which “the subject conceives of itself as universal centre, surrounded by the stable plenitude of an object world”. Although this perspectival terrain offers a profound sense of stability, unseen mechanisms of power are at play within its structure. Bryson points out that through viewing, we enter into a terrain in which sight equals perception but, far from being natural, it is socially created and imbued with a “politics of vision”. This raises questions not only about the political implications for how we see the world but also questions about our position within it.

Henna Nadeem’s meticulously assembled collages use generic images of nature taken from calendars and magazines such as National Geographic to create intricate and visually arresting works. Nadeem’s collages force our eyes to flit between the whole and the skeletal patterned duplicate, which is overlaid. To take on board the coherent whole means seeing the fractured surface; viewing the fractured surface means we cannot see the whole.

Annabel Howland’s ‘cut outs’ involve removing certain pictorial details, such as horizons, mountain ranges, or roads, from large landscape photographs. Following this process of excision what remain are marks, patterns and shapes that form wall-based photographic-sculptural works which are as physically delicate as they are visually coherent, teetering, as they do, between representation and abstraction.

Camilia Sposati’s large-scale video installation, Talk To Me, commences with awesome aerial views of a metropolis contrast with a soundtrack in which a man and woman share a private conversation. While the roving camera circles, high over the city, like a lost spirit, and night becomes day and day becomes night, the couples’ causal but evidently disjointed conversation ebbs and flows, between the mundane and the fantastical.

Ingrid Pollard honed in on the minutiae of the land, with a series of photographic images of geological rock forms. Having undergone a process of enlargement, these huge scanner chrome images appear as landscapes within landscapes, reminiscent of the apocalyptic world of Hieronymus Bosch.

The Search for Terrestrial Intelligence's interactive website project invited participants to locate signs of terrestrial life by selecting a location on an aerial photograph. As a pseudo –scientific experiment in which data is gathered and processed, STI’s project explored the populist fascination with alien life.

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