The
power of Landscape
Gai Anderson
Subankar
Banerjee
Caribou
Migration I,Brant and Snow Geese with Chicks, Caribou Tracks on Tundra, Caribou
Tracks on Coal Seams II.
The
power of landscape continues with the work of New York Based Indian Artist
Subhankar Banerjee. The beauty of his large-scale, incredibly detailed
still-photography – aerial views of pristine landscapes – is
startling.
The
combination of composition, colour, light and form grab you immediately, like
the most exquisite paintings. But then slowly, as you move in to take a closer
look at the incredible detail of the environments he captures, a different
vision begins to appear. For these landscapes are alive with beings - caribou
and snow geese in this case.
So
while these worlds he presents to us may be pristine, they are not empty or
untouched, and the view of these patterns of animal habitation become a sort of
mapping of the ancient and continuous patterns of movement across the
landscape.
In
his photographic work Banerjee is attempting to map the eco-culturally
significant places on the planet,( so far the Arctic and the Desert of New
Mexico) places which he describes as the “Most connected land on
earth .”
His
work addresses resource wars, climate change and Indigenous human rights, and
through this he is attempting to build a visual philosophy of eco-cultural
rights.
With
his childhood spent in rural Bengal, India he was imbued with a deep
interest in the value of the land, not from a Western scientific perspective
but from the point of view the landscape itself and the beings which inhabit
it.
Nipan
Oranniwesna
City
of Ghost,
2012
Thai
artist Nippan Oranniwesna, creates a very different kind of landscape in his
huge site-specific piece which is laid out across the floor of the gallery. A
sort of universal landscape, which at first it looks like a white river
estuary, or salt plain – an aerial photograph made 3D. But his process is
intriguing, for in the City of Ghosts, meticulously cut -out maps of
more than 10 different cities (leaving only the roads and rivers intact) are
layered and stenciled using baby powder as a medium to create a sprawling
cityscape that is a combination of all those cities together.The resultant
“map”, reflecting the interconnectedness of our society, is also an exploration
of different ways of exploring the city – focused and meticulous cutting or
walking its streets. The tracks are in places reminiscent of the caribou tracks
in the previous work.
The
powder which settles and is held together by humidity which helps to form and
sustain the shapes. The whole piece is then unpredictable and changes over
time, like the cities themselves.
