Cynthia Hooper

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My intricate landscape paintings and drawings examine those marginal or provisional places usually designated for bland functionality or cast-about accumulation. Such sites include the environments around industrial zones, vacant lots, and landfills. These ubiquitous and often unassuming sites generate many formal and conceptual contradictions—the familiar dialectic between the natural and the manufactured, for example, or between the intentional and the entropic. Places like these also provide discrete refuge for our culture’s myriad infrastructural systems, but when happened upon, can also generate a subtle anxiety about the safety and veracity of those systems. Ubiquitous cylindrical storage tanks, for example, can be elegantly attenuated and even archetypal—but may also enclose mysterious and possibly perilous substances. Industrial brownfields left to lie fallow, likewise, can be meditative and eerily uncanny—but also noxious sites bereft of beauty and value.

My interdisciplinary projects similarly examine the interplay between these sites' peculiar formal appeal and the more concrete complexities of their social, political, and environmental condition. Unearthing a site's (sometimes sobering, sometimes amusing, always interesting) stories make its morphology more comprehensible, and its subtle details more compelling. Deploying documentary-style photography and text-based research methods toward this aim—sometimes alongside paintings and drawings—serves also to underscore the dialectic between the presumed objectivity and "truthfulness" of photography and the more obvious artifice of hand-made images.

Focusing on these types of places tends to problematize traditionally held assumptions about landscape and landscape painting in particular. Although terms like picturesque and sublime have attended the definition of landscape since the eighteenth century, landscape historian J.B. Jackson asserts that yet earlier definitions emphasized not the bucolic beauty of the land, but rather its mediation and control. Jackson therefore posits a renewed definition for landscape, one that revisits its distant etymological past: a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence. My pictures and projects serve in part to illuminate this assertion.

Bucheon Gallery 389 Grove St. San Francisco CA
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11am-6pm (415)863-2891 email:bucheon@earthlink.net