Landscape and Process
My paintings investigate landscape by exploring the perceptive boundaries associated with western aesthetic preferences, the colonial gaze, and the importance of ecological agents. Stemming from a balance of research, direct observations, and a sense of place, my paintings often inhibit ‘the gaze’ beginning with scale, both from spatial and temporal perspectives. The intention is to evoke a sense of agency to individual organisms or geographical features in a landscape. Evoking greater agency to a subject increases the perceived value and alters one’s sensibility associated with the subject. Subjects in my work, such as the often-sublimated individual tree or impenetrable rock face, lend a greater sense of existence to these naturalistic features. I opt for them to inhibit the view of wide-open spaces to amplify this effect. Since landscape never exists in a static state, the incorporation of emotive brush strokes exhibits natural phenomena depicting the unseen interpretations of energetic states while tethered to the original subject’s formal representations. This has led me to loosen our anthropocentric grounding through the differentiation of both human visual and temporal perspectives. Blurring these constraints will hopefully allow for greater sensitivity to singular naturalistic features and illuminate their ecological importance. In time, exposure to new landscape aesthetics will offer new relational and philosophical conception of landscape, thus enlivening new perspectives on natural resource management and ecological sensitivity.
Email: Adam.Hinkelman@colostate.edu
