Landscapes have caught the focus of artists since time began as what is seen in a landscape prepares one for what is just ahead and how we feel about our environment. This is the focus in Landscapes, a two person online exhibition featuring Guang Yu Zhang and Cecilia Moy Fradet. Thinking along the line - of what is ahead and considering the landscapes presented by these two artists we encounter two very different points of view. The viewer must first absorb the visual in front, dwell in the symbolism of imagery and palette to be able to enter and ultimately conquer and exit the landscapes presented - this is how one overcomes what lies ahead, or decides to stay.
For Zhang a landscape is the site of melding both nature and the material world with spaceships, sea-life, lasers and more. This type of landscape seems to believe that it is this mixture that creates, and in some cases replaces the natural and expected environment. In so doing the artist invites imagination to populate the landscape in unexpected ways, which in turn makes the artist the creator and the viewer the author of the story in the landscape. Both must work together to place themselves in the landscape presented. Moy Fradet takes a very different approach and in some ways seems to stay in a more traditional practice because of her monolithic mountains, which seem to not only dwarf the individual but also block the path and limit the view. That may be the case topographically but for the employment of the viewer’s imagination - which gives us mountains to climb, to conquer, we understand that key to her landscape is the imagination of the viewer. Instead of being blocked by a mountain, the verier can instead repose in the palette and find comfort. Both artists employ colors symbolically unexpected in a landscape, for example an almost white landscape, or a blue stone mountain - these creative depictions do not make the landscape any less real - they make them more imagined, and that is what allows for entrance.
Imagination is no stranger to the artistic practice - what makes things ‘new’ is the guiding hand of the artist that leads the viewer down, or up, pathways of exploration. What becomes apparent beyond the skill of the artist is the viewer’s willingness to be led and to insert their reaction into an artwork. How the viewer ‘reads’ the imagery in the work gives them the keys needed to move forward, or unexpectedly, to also stay.
Statement by Melanie Prapopoulos
