NEW PALTZ, NY.- The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz opened "Landmines," an exhibition of camera-based work by artists exploring the role landscape plays in burying or exhuming social history.
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“Landmines” coincides with the bicentennial of Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole’s first trip up the Hudson River. The trip is often recounted as the origination of an art movement lauded for pastorals that were inflected with Protestant ideals. Yet what this exhibition commemorates is a confluence of events that compel us to think critically about the relationship between land, representation, and history.
200 years ago was also when the earliest existing landscape photographs were taken and when large populations of Native people from New York were forcibly relocated to Wisconsin. Through photographs, videos, and installations that shed light on sites of exploitation, Landmines commemorates this laden anniversary by offering contemporary perspectives on what landscapes recall about ourselves.
Dawoud Bey coaxes history from what he refers to as “inscrutable” places of trauma. Allowing the horror of slavery to hauntingly complicate bucolic scenery of former plantations, his photographs reframe sites of "Black bodies in captivity and aspiration.”
Honoring migrant farmworkers while exposing their hardship, Christina Fernandez reconnects land in Southern California to the often-overlooked people who work it. Her photocollage and installation reclaim the border region as an important site in the history of the Chicano Movement.
Richard Mosse documents environmental devastation to the Amazon Basin that has culminated from a long history of colonial conquest. Through multispectral satellite and ultraviolet microscopic imagery, he exposes the staggering degree to which mining and agribusiness continue to wreak havoc on both indigenous communities and vital ecosystems.
Against drone footage of areas that lost their protection as National Monuments under the first Trump Administration, Rick Silva superimposes digital renderings of subterranean minerals. By drawing attention to how mining and energy companies threaten public as well as sacred indigenous land, Silva reminds us that as the political landscape shifts, so does the geological, perhaps irreparably.
A display of pages from Thomas Cole’s 1828 sketchbook greets visitors as a prologue to the exhibition. As a postscript, Provenance (2023) by Erin Lee Antonak (Wolf Clan member of Oneida Indian Nation) ruminates on an experience losing a moccasin in a Catskill Mountain range.
“In dialogue with Landmines, these works prompt consideration of how artists understand their place in the world,” explains curator Sophie Landres, “how beliefs shape depictions of regions, why landscapes inspire artistic imagination, and what role museums play in framing historic narratives.”
On view through July 13, Landmines takes place on the unceded and ancestral homelands of the Munsee-speaking Esopus of the Lenape people. Made possible with support from Art Bridges, it inaugurates an initiative to rethink what it means to be a regional art museum in the context of colonial and discriminatory traditions.
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