Radical Terrain, the third exhibition in the series Modernist Art from India, highlights the exploration of landscape in Indian art for the generation after independence. The exhibition will also feature new work by international contemporary artists of diverse backgrounds currently working in and identifying with landscape. This is both a response to the modernist paintings on view and to work towards a nuanced conceptual understanding of what "landscape" in art is.
The contemporary artists included in Radical Terrain will each lead an informal conversation with Assistant Curator Beth Citron within the museum's galleries on select Friday nights at 6:15 p.m.
Meghan Boody creates vivid images and scenes that are led by a central narrative with whimsical and often disturbing imagery. She most often works in digital photocollage, but occasionally creates three-dimensional sculptures and other interactive objects. Boody’s best-known series is her Lighthouse Project, which comprises images that take place in a lush nineteenth-century Anglo countryside. There, Boody explains, "urchins and strays struggle to find their way." The series tells a story of a young girl, an inmate of a workhouse/asylum, who escapes when the building burns down. Her fanciful journey through the country landscape includes stops in a lighthouse, in a swampy secretion, and back to the rebuilt institution. Boody’s work engages Victorian aesthetics and language, even titling her Lighthouse Project photocollages with the first lines of famous nineteenth-century novels.
Meghan Boody lives and works in New York City.
All images provided courtesy of the artist.
To hear the full interview with this artist, or to download the complete Exhibition Audio Tour, please visit our iTunes U channel.
1996 MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art
1993 BA, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
Hasan Elahi is an interdisciplinary media artist whose work challenges the notions of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, borders, and frontiers. Elahi’s exploration of these issues began in 2002 when he was detained in Detroit, suspected of hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit. Though the artist was subsequently cleared, his frequent international travels subjected him to months of questioning by the FBI. Turning the onerous duty of constantly updating them of his whereabouts into an irreverent social commentary, Elahi began to make every single detail of his personal life available to the public through his ongoing project Tracking Transience, available from www.trackingtransience.net. A live GPS tracker updates Elahi's location on the site's Google map. More recently Elahi has extended his practice to projects that push the limits of surveillance, using looped, manipulated, and aesthetically pleasant footage to simulate surveillance and lead viewers to confront the tediousness of the construct.
Mr. Elahi discussed the dynamics of transforming his questioning by the FBI into art during his 2011 TEDGlobal Talk.
Hasan Elahi lives and works in College Park, Maryland, roughly equidistant from the headquarters of the FBI, CIA, and NSA.
All images provided courtesy of the artist.
To hear the full interview with this artist, or to download the complete Exhibition Audio Tour, please visit our iTunes U channel.
2000 BA, Brown University
Isca Greenfield-Sanders explores the relationship between photography and painting in her multimedia works on canvas. She begins her process by choosing a vintage slide from the 1950s or 1960s. She gravitates towards images that are universal and anonymous, but were once personal—a family at a beach, figures parachuting, a football match. These photos contain one or more figures within a landscape, enabling her to manipulate the balance of figuration to landscape. Greenfield-Sanders first paints the chosen image as a 7 x 7 inch watercolor and color pencil study. That study is then enlarged and printed the size of the final canvas in a grid of squares; the prints are secured to the canvas beneath a clear acrylic, onto which she paints with oils. By translating one photograph into paintings of different sizes, Greenfield-Sanders is able to move individual elements of the image to varying degrees of representation and abstraction. In doing so, she is able to explore the intricacies of individual formal relationships within a resolved image, through work that is at its core about the nature of painting itself.
Isca Greenfield-Sanders lives and works in New York City and the Hudson Highlands. She attended Brown University completing degrees in Mathematics and Visual Art in 2000. In 2001, she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.
All images provided courtesy of the artist.
To hear the full interview with this artist, or to download the complete Exhibition Audio Tour, please visit our iTunes U channel.
2003 MFA, Columbia University
1998 BFA, Rhode Island School of Design
Marc Handelman is a conceptual painter concerned primarily with the representation and theory of landscape. His notable projects and exhibitions including Continuous Grounds and Warm White Blizzard explored such elements as modulations of light and the texture of surfaces, integral to our perception of both the natural environment and painting. Revealing his research and thinking about landscape in another medium, Handelman developed the 740-page book Archive for a Mountain, to show a collection of images, advertisements, and text fragments of the view from Eagle’s Nest, Adolf Hitler's summer mountain retreat in Obersalzberg, Germany. The book also contains highlighted passages from W.J.T. Mitchell's seminal edited volume Landscape and Power, thus using Hitler's retreat as an example of a heightened connection between the terms in that title and inserting his own project into that discourse. Handelman's engagement with the principles of landscape also extend to its micro structures, leading to the series Dimension Stone, comprising trompe l’oeil paintings that replicate the surface appearance of various stones.
Marc Handelman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
All images provided courtesy of the artist.
To hear the full interview with this artist, or to download the complete Exhibition Audio Tour, please visit our iTunes U channel.
1986 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
1983 BA, Yale University
Byron Kim is a painter whose work lies at the intersection of figurative, abstract, and conceptual art. In the series Synecdoche, for instance, he paints abstract-looking grids from hundreds of different skin colors, each corresponding to the tone of a sitter/model. For the past 11 years, he has also painted a small square patch of the sky weekly, in his series Sunday Paintings, the title of which alludes ironically to a tradition of amateur painting done especially on the weekends. The Sunday Paintings series was inspired by Kim's chance encounter with the writing of Chuang Tze, an early Daoist, who wrote about the relationship of the infinite to the infinitesimal. In both series, as in much of his other work, Kim's paintings look like abstractions even though they are literal representations of a subject—a specific person's skin, or the sky in a particular location on a certain date. The aesthetics of Kim’s work reflects a range of inspirations and influences: Minimalism and Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, along with abstract painting.
Byron Kim lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
All images provided courtesy of the artist.
To hear the full interview with this artist, or to download the complete Exhibition Audio Tour, please visit our iTunes U channel.
2003 MFA, Columbia University
1996 BA, Brandeis University
Lisi Raskin focuses her practice on the aesthetics, politics, and anxiety surrounding the military-industrial complex, particularly with regard to Cold War-era activities. She works most often with large-scale installations that become complete environments, in which she has performed and also displayed her own paintings, drawings, and sculpture. Her research on twentieth-century militarism has taken her to the Arctic Circle, Scotland, former East German and Yugoslav atomic bunkers, and the American West. For Armada (2009), at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, Raskin created paintings and sculptures based on forms she found at the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, a storage facility for military airplanes in Arizona. More recently, she has collaborated with the artist Kimberly Kay on the ongoing project MotorPark, whereby Raskin and Kay are transforming a functional school bus into a mobile hub for creative activity. MotorPark has already served as a stage for community-based art initiatives where it is parked in Portland, Maine, and once it is ready to travel, Raskin and Kay plan to stage lectures, film screenings, studio-based classes, and other programming around the country.
Lisi Raskin lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
All images provided courtesy of the artist.
To hear the full interview with this artist, or to download the complete Exhibition Audio Tour, please visit our iTunes U channel.
1998 BA, BFA, Rhode Island School of Design
Seher Shah's works integrate principles of architectural modernism and an artistic sensibility, reflecting her academic background in Fine Arts and Architecture. Shah's largely monochromatic drawings, prints, and photographs reveal a sense of play with the block-like, linear forms of Brutalist architecture, a movement that emerged from modernism and flourished around the world from the 1950s through the 1970s. In her Object Anxiety (2011) and Radiant Lines (2012) series, Shah deconstructs the authoritarian qualities of Brutalism by breaking down structures into their constituent parts. In this way, once-oppressive forms become delicate abstractions. Beyond her interest in representing and interpreting architectural modernism, Shah’s artistic practice integrates different architectural, historical, and personal iconographies; for example, the series Paper to Monument (2010) combines official histories with her personal recollections of the various cities and cultures in which she has lived.
Seher Shah lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
All images provided courtesy of the artist.
To hear the full interview with this artist, or to download the complete Exhibition Audio Tour, please visit our iTunes U channel.
1998 MFA, School of Visual Arts, New York
1998 Hochschule fur Bilende Kuenste
Janaina Tschäpe creates dreamlike, fantastical environments in large-scale painting, multimedia works, and installation. Tschäpe privileges organic forms and personal experience in her artistic practice, using her own body as a foil for the mythologies and forms she creates. In the diaristic series 100 Little Deaths (1996-2002), she explored her body’s response to travel as she moved around various countries and continents. Tschäpe would document herself in new places, conflating the representation of her body with the external landscape. She stated: “The space was very related to either new places I was living, or new places I was going to...I was really a landscape.” In Blood, Sea (2004), Tschäpe creates a narrative experience centered on the surface of a body of water. In the video and photographs comprising the series, the perspective regularly shifts so the viewer is sometimes on a ship above the water and sometimes enmeshed in the scene. Visually, this abstracts an aquatic landscape, highlighting a kaleidoscopic range of organic forms. Tschäpe has continued to explore related principles in recent years, as her cut-out paper sculptures embody organic elements of water, life, and nature and undergo a shift from horizontal to vertical perspective when completed and exhibited on a wall.
Janaina Tschäpe lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
All images provided courtesy of the artist.
To hear the full interview with this artist, or to download the complete Exhibition Audio Tour, please visit our iTunes U channel.
