Mixed Motives: Hegemony in Landscape

  

 

 

Human attachment to landscape is the common denominator between our desire for belonging and sense of identity. I observe how landscape is more than a physical place but a cultural construct that can be decoded and read to inform what we know of our cultural identity. Our everyday surroundings or landscape contains a fascinating sense of time and heritage of human values yet are susceptible to constant change.  Landscape is the living link to our past and the setting in which records our daily existence.

 

I compare these identifying characteristics of landscape to that of human skin. By presenting the viewer with surreal skin environments, I hope to inspire empathy for our world when observing the assertion of human dominance seen in human flesh. I look to the Romantics fascination with the overwhelming power of nature and compare this subliminal experience to that of humans ability to massively transform the world that we are apart of. Human’s inability to control nature only reveals the hubris in our ability to modify it.