Mathew Pokoik - news

The Interactive Landscape will be open at Mt Tremper Arts from 9/2/07 - 10/14/07 in the Catskill Mountains of NY.

Curated by Mathew Pokoik and Featuring the work of Ian Baguskas, Aaron Diskin, Emmet Gowin, John Daido Loori, Daido Moriyama, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Christian Patterson, Mathew Pokoik, Matthew Porter, Susana Raab, Stephen Shore, Amy Stein, and Mark Wyse.

A photographic web preview can be found here.

Curators Statement for The Interactive Landscape

Landscape has always been tied to our deepest desires as a culture. It is the place where our sustenance comes from and the place we return to for respite. It has become a place where wonder can still be found, a place we actively seek to escape from modern day realities, a place of return, a place endowed with a secular sacredness, a modern day pilgrimage site.

In Stephen Shore’s Yosemite we are presented with what appears to be a family contained within an almost sexual and certainly sensual landscape. The way the tip of the beach meets the water is like a gentle caress of skin touching skin, or the shape of a breast. The entire landscape conjures up the female goddess of fertility and nature that has been banished within our Judeo/Christian framework. And within this landscape we have the act of photographing, what appears to be a brother photographing his sibling entering the water. Worlds within worlds – photographs within photographs, it asks the question: what is the act of photography?

©Stephen Shore Yosemite

Imagine the Interactive Landscape as a journey through mythological time. Beginning with the Garden of Eden and onward to temptation and the fall. Could it be that all landscape-based art is a conversation with our original mythos of nature? A conversation with the Garden - with paradise - with temptation and death? Aaron Diskin’s mysteriously dark and beautiful untitled photograph speaks to my eye of Eve in the garden with temptation, or the medieval maiden, sexuality and death. It is one of those rare photographs that is exactly what it is yet also touches upon the mythological, the otherworldly.

In John Daido Loori’s photographs of Mt. Tremper and Morning Light, rather than dealing with Eden we might say he takes up the Buddhist perspective of the non-dual; his photographs are of simply mountains, clouds, snow, trees, light. We are presented with the conundrum that the Fall never happened – it is an invention of our mind. His photographs present an experience of landscape that is not apart from us, not of the other – these photographs are direct / present / accessible. They are the gateway we pass through as we enter the physical space that contains this photographic exhibition.

©Mark Wyse Fishing Hole

Respite / recreation / a oneness with nature is a theme within Mark Wyse’s two images, Fishing Hole and an untitled image from his Surfer’s series. In Fishing Hole we have a scene like Shore’s; we find mountains, water, people, the classic themes of landscape, yet the culvert in the foreground hints at a larger perspective that shades the possible meanings of his photograph with additional layers of complexity and subtly. Ian Baguskas’s Maiden of the Mist IV also presents us with a landscape of extraordinary beauty, the waterfalls, the rainbow, and this seemingly dwarfed ship precariously close to the falls. It hints at an underlining tension and the raw power of nature contained within this tourist based landscape.

©Ian Baguskas Maiden in the Mist IV

At some point in our history, the landscape became an abstract and separate entity, a place to photograph, to visit as a tourist, to photograph in an attempt at claiming it. Or a place to re-create, such as an in-door ski resort in Dubai or a photographic backdrop that allows us to capture the illusion of great expanse in a take-home snapshot, as in Susana Raab’s, C2 Marketing Event, McSoccerfestival. We encounter this again in Christian Patterson’s girl with cellular phone, who sitting within a natural landscape is engaged with capturing its appearance within her digital phone/camera. It asks the question: can photographs separate us from this very landscape we seek for respite?

©Mathew Pokoik Dubai, Indoor Ski Resort

In other instances we seek to protect ourselves from that landscape, to create homes and structures, yet nature has its ways of creeping in. Amy Stein’s photographic re-creations of animal and human encounters, hint at the fierce wildness that we are unable to suppress or control. Or Daido Moriyama’s Stray Dog from the streets of Misawa or the flight of Birds through the old city of Dubai, even in an Urban setting Nature lives and breaths and finds a way to survive, to interact with us.

©Amy Stein Trash Eaters

This show speaks of our modern day conundrum, what is our interaction with landscape? With nature? With our world? We stand on this ground surrounded by the undeniable force and ineffable quality of nature. Yet this ground is the cliff’s edge, and we have -like Matthew Porter’s Car Crash - launched ourselves over the precipice.

©Matthew Porter Crash