featuring work by national and international artists - Leah Koransky, Emily Margarit Mason, Meg Roussos, Meganelizabeth Diamond, and Madeline Cass
curated by Madeline Cass
July 2022 / Wallspace-LNK
that space, that garden was a group exhibition from lens-based artists Madeline Cass (NE), Meganelizabeth Diamond (CAN), Leah Koransky (CA), Emily Margarit Mason (NM) and Meg Roussos (WA) exploring the expansive possibilities that are given life when femme and queer perspectives engage with the genre of "landscape". Though the legacy of this imagery is firmly stamped with terms like "modernism" and "straight photography", this group of artists uses the tools of photographic history, from the earliest photographic methods to the most postmodern, to investigate the tactility and emotionality of a climate on the brink of catastrophe.
While distinctive in practice, the tools of these artists all overlap; their methodologies and processes are all oriented toward engaging with the land around them as an active co-conspirator. Through their images, these artists do not beg the viewer to "see like me" but rather invite the audience to "see for yourself" or, better yet, "touch for yourself".
Physically constructed interventions staged by Meg Roussos pair with the re-photographing and assembling of natural materials present in the studio constructions of Emily Margarit Mason and Meganelizabeth Diamond provide tactile avenues for understanding the natural world. Simultaneously, the imagery explored by Madeline Cass and Leah Koransky engage in the fickle temporality of necessary cycles, from witnessing prescribed burns to religiously tracking the shadows of neighboring trees across the wall. This meeting of methodologies demonstrates a variety of ways to process the unknowable powers underpinned by observable cycles in the natural world. There is an excitement in this, in this enthusiasm and obsession with things that exist outside of us, in engaging with and embracing the impossibility of ever truly understanding, in existing in that space, that garden.
-Delaney Hoffman
To read Delaney’s full essay
