Television Landscapes
Durational gesture drawings created during a defined period of broadcast or streamed television (project statement below)
Artist Statement | Television Landscapes
Each painting in the Television Landscapes Series begins as a durational gesture drawing made during a television program of defined length. That drawing is later worked in ink and/or paint until a finished composition emerges. Most often the size of the painting reflects the duration or complexity of the program, with the larger images generally relating to programs of an hour or more, or short broadcasts such as a single advertisement, being rendered in smaller formats.
At its root the "Television Landscapes Series,"" like the active "Literary Landscape Series, grows out of the idea of landscape painting as a construct rather than direct representation. With finished large-scale landscapes frequently composed in the studio, the genre of ‘Western’ landscape painting emerged as a unique genre along with the development of modern capitalism and the Nation State: ironically simultaneous with the subsequent disappearance of the very landscapes ‘captured’ as paintings. By this logic traditional landscape painting locates the viewer within the colonial imaginary: an iconography of a disassembled nature, a locus of ‘primitive’ fantasies, or a nostalgic salve for alienation.
By expanding the concept ‘landscape’ to include any mediated environment such as television broadcasts or printed text, the goal is to invite viewers to reconsider the internal or virtual spaces where people increasingly ‘spend’ time. The investigation of television as source material for time spent (rather than ‘nature’), and the abstract similarities of the results regardless of specific programming, exposes the viewiers relationship to the passage of time as a passive consumers of media. As television viewers we turn ourselves over to a communal experience with largely strangers (we can only know the smallest percentage of also-viewers). While this abstracted sense of community can create a shared experience base with others, for example small talk with intimates or strangers and an allegence of shared enthusiams or dislikes, the practice itself of watching generally happens in either isolation or with intimates, maintaing the social alienation so familar with consumption of contempory, domestic media.