DESCRIPTION:

Vision Quest: Into Nature

2015

Installation – mixed media

Billboard Size - L 4000 H 2200 mm

Public Artwork Commission -  Incinerator Gallery 2015

Vision Quest: Into Nature examines the existential crisis that arises from such uncertainty about the future. Installed in the garden at Incinerator Gallery, the image appears on a billboard, erected by the artist. Juxtapositioned against one another, the two landscapes intersect and rupture one another. The contrast of the natural and built environment engages a conversation, drawing a circle around how the two environments are disjointed or innately connected. The poignancy of presenting this work within this context alludes that the future of one, is bound to the other.

Historically there has been the propensity in photography and painting to frame nature into landscapes, cultivating sections of Earth to create the ‘ideal environment’. Artist Olafur Eliasson has said, ‘just by looking at nature, we cultivate it into an image.’ Subconsciously our eyes reorder and cultivate so that our environment as we want it to be, rather than as it is. As though drawn from memory, rather than by sight. Into Nature breaks down traditional notions of the picture plane and engages a discourse on the mechanisms of contemplating the future within the context of existential anxiety.