The Hills are Alive, curated by Laurie Steelink
Featuring Kate Harding, Aaron Noble, and Chris Wilder

Opening reception Saturday, October 24, 7 - 9PM
Oct. 24 – Nov. 28, 2009

Whether the Sound of Music’s megahit, “The Hills are Alive” or the recent Chiller channel’s TV series by the same name comes to mind, both allude to life in the landscape, whether it be in the hills of Austria or Ojai, California. The three artists in this exhibition, Kate Harding, Aaron Noble and Chris Wilder make reference to the lay and life of the land, the restructuring of terrain, the abstractions and even the fiction that exists from attempting to recreate landscape.

Kate Harding’s meticulously restructured landscapes on paper speak to the early American landscape painters who sketched in the field while making detailed notations for what would eventually become paintings in their studios. Like these early artists, Harding not only creates sketches, she transposes them by incorporating pattern making notations for darts, seam allowances, and alignment marks. The pieces are eventually cut and pieced together restructuring all the elements in her original sketch to create a landscape on a very different plane than the originally observed one.

Like the TV series, Star Trek’s opening lines: “Space: The final frontier…to explore strange new worlds,_ to seek out new life and new civilizations_, to boldly go where no man has gone before” Aaron Noble’s vision of landscape is un-chartered and unknown. Through the process of surgically extracting elements of landscape, costume and body parts from comic books Noble creates collages by reconfiguring these elements, which then become mysterious transmutations within space.

“Orbis Veteribus Notus” (mixed media, 2009) by Chris Wilder is a piece about the collapse and inversion of traditional landscape photography and contemporary cartography. Wilder states, “throughout the ages, landscape photography tends to the romantic, the symbolic and the sublime. From picture postcards to Edward Weston, landscape photographs are a kind of promise that these are vistas that we could see if we only escaped to that location. Wilder’s photographs, while using the language of landscape photography, actually subvert it because the scenes depicted, while admittedly romantic, are not only extremely difficult to find, but would be impossible to see even if they could be found.” Wilder also points out the differences between contemporary cartography, “which employs stark technical realism,” “and serves to perform an entirely practical function of “getting from Point A to Point B,”” to a time when maps were “creatively and beautifully, if inaccurately rendered with fantastical illustrations representing the “Great Unknown.”” Wilder also concludes that maps “were once the launch pads of daydreams, fantasies, and adventures.”