Where we live often defines us. Not that the actual inanimate buildings, bridges, parks or planned communities literally do anything to us, but more that we change and redefine ourselves according to where we live. Think of the differences in attitude between a Manhattan-ite and a farmer, or someone who lives in crumbling house as opposed to a manicured suburban McMansion - where we live is often who we end up becoming. Perhaps that's why some people move so often - to outrun their cultural destiny.

In response to this shaping of our character by landscape and our need to reshape landscape to fit our character, curator Stephanie Snyder has assembled a group of works that push the idea even further out of confining realms. In suddenly: where we live now, Snyder has sought out works that imagine the possibilities of landscape and space that often "exist beyond historical definitions...and conventional cycles of development and disuse." Her idea is that a parking lot, for example, has an indigenous history to it, but yet where does it fall into our architecture of self? How do commonplace structures and landscaping that are not objects d'art comment on our psyche - and what conversations do they create?

Frank Heath's "40 Stones in Morningside Park" photographic synopsis, and display of actual rocks, examines not just the historical nature of this typical landscape creation - a park - but more so, the stones that lay randomly throughout that park, stones that are the reason for the park's value to our activist history. In the late 1960s, student protestors marched through Morningside on their way to demonstrate in surrounding universities such as Columbia, picking up rocks on their way to throw at police. There is no judgment placed on the protestor's method of expression; instead, Heath has removed random rocks from the park, made plaster molds of them, and then returned the plaster casts to the exact location of the original stones. He then photographed the glowing white orbs among nature - and displays the rocks themselves on a shelf next to the 40 photographs. It's an interesting idea, although some of the photographed molds seem almost too ideally placed in artistic composition. Still, the concept that these rocks serve as natural monuments to a turbulent past is fascinating, and a clear example of the show's theme at work: a park is an idyllic land of playfulness, but it can also be the quarry for emotional ammunitions.

Michael Damm's three-projector installation of various time-elapsed footage of a bus stop in the middle of a city also calls attention to a place we might see every day, yet seldom actually look at. The main camera has captured in real-time a huddle of passengers waiting for their buses to arrive. Some young people sit in the street, others hang off the edge of the curb, and half a dozen have cell phones stuck to their ears. There are riders of all ages, sizes and colors, and little by little, they herd onto a diesel, eventually emptying out the median. The other two projectors show both a stop motion angle of the same scene, and an accelerated version of what one might glimpse from inside a bus window as it barrels down city streets.  Riding the bus is a mundane activity, and often an invisible one - but when called to attention, bus stops and riders form a part of our landscape that is both oddly commonplace, and yet integral to our cultural landscape.

Other works feature items that we never pay attention to in everyday life - discarded camping gear and dishes, a gash in a wall made by an ax that leans up against it, and photographs of several shorelines where famous people have perished. These are things we subconsciously avoid looking at perhaps, avoid adding to the visual of our daily routine or our sense of self. Yet, when they are removed from their place in landscape and held up, they elicit an instant understanding of what they are and what they are for, and ignite a discussion over what they represent to us. All of these things are a part of our lives, after all, but yet enjoy no real genre of definition, and their symbolism is both unique to each of us, and at the same time, universal.

-STacy Davies

(Images: All images courtesy of the artists and Pomon College Museum of Art, 2009)