william mazza | portfolio

Artist Statement

Each painting in the Literary Landscape series is a drawn or painted accumulation of select text from a book or poem meaningful to the artist, a process that generates an annotated artifact of the specific text added on each date, until completion. The Literary Landscape Cover Series, however, uses a totality of text--most often the text on the cover of a similarly meaningful book or recording--as the starting point for a series of drawings where the text is accumulated, abstracted, and re-worked in ongoing iterations, eventually rendered in ink or paint. All these works are ideally displayed with the originating texts.

At its root the “Literary Landscape” & “Literary Landscape Cover Series” grew out of the idea of landscape painting as construct rather than direct representation. Frequently built in the studio, the genre of ‘Western’ landscape painting arguably came into its own simultaneous with the development of modern capitalism and the Nation State. Ironically, often with the subsequent disappearance of the very landscapes ‘captured’ as paintings. By this logic traditional landscape painting locating the viewer withing the colonial imaginary: an iconography of a disassembled nature, a locus of ‘primitive’ fantasies, or a salve for alienation.

By expanding the concept ‘landscape’ to include any mediated environment, the goal is to invite viewers to reconsider the internal or virtual spaces where people increasingly ‘spend’ time. The investigation of text as source material for time spent (rather than ‘nature’), and the inclusion of process artifacts, multiple iterations, video documentation, and ephemera, encourages viewers to expand their understanding of visual experience. Therefore, the intention of these series is to expose multiple concepts: how reading translates to thought; the relationship between the written word and understanding; the spaces between individual and collective experience of language; the subsequent potential for meaning to be obscured; and how those multiple meanings can present as visual language.