Artistic rendering of landscape is not the passive accumulation of naturalist detail, but an active operation: it is of this world as well as in it. Land (natural, biological, and manmade forms) is aesthetically processed — idealized, deconstructed, abstracted, sanctified — and turned into landscape. The critic W. J. T. Mitchell argued that landscape is not so much a genre as a “medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other.” If landscape is a medium of exchange, what is being exchanged? This show, presenting 43 artists, working across painting, photography, and print, as well as the intersections of Annie Varnot PCT: Washington Sun Flares and Fire, 2018 multimedia, answers this question in a variety of ways. Many artists update the legacy of the avant-garde, using abstraction, collage, and other means of dislocation to force viewers to reconsider what they take to be natural. Others stake a more classic position, seeking out the Renaissance ideal of “amenity” or the sensory pleasure of well-ordered nature, which carries its own implications in our increasingly hyper-real and synthetic world. And still others move away from the two dimensional, bringing painting and sculpture into direct conversation. However, what they all share is succinctly captured in Wallace Steven’s “Anecdote of the Jar,”

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird of bush.
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The slight intervention of the jar transforms and then dominates unruly nature; everything takes a
point in relation to it. This show explores that ongoing relation.

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