a landscape hosts something
a landscape hosts something is a new workshop I conceptualized while performing research for my fellowship with the Center for Book Arts this May. At the CBA, I’m looking into how artists use the idiom of the book to re-engage with landscape as a field of critical artistic practice. The question is rooted in the foundation I built for Poetics of Place, and I’m discovering how the landscape lens allows us writers and artists to engage context in its ecological, social, and political dimesions.
“Landscape” as a field of art has long been critiqued as colonial and capitalist, and for good reason. From Dutch and Flemish landscape painting in the early 17th century, to the 19th century Hudson Valley School and 20th century Group of Seven in Canada, art history is replete with landscape representation from an Englightenment worldview. But since World War II, and long before the Age of Reason, artists and writers have represented landscapes in their fragmentary and complete complexity. Rather than discard landscape, I wanted this workshop to approach landscapes as a way of being with the world — or, as Haraway calls it, “staying with the trouble.”
a landscape hosts something took place in Toronto’s Bickford Park three consecutive Wednesdays in July. I facilitated each session around a pair of practices — describing/collecting, imaging/imagining, mapping/abstraction — and each comprised a minichallenge and a maxichallenge (for all my rpdr fans out there). I was amazed by the playful, curious spirit each participant brought to the workshop & I can’t wait to faciliate more of these in the future.
In today’s post, I’d like to share with you select participant material created during the workshop.