At the Marietta-Cobb Museum of Art, curator Madeline Beck continues to produce some of the most innovative, ambitious and thought-provoking exhibitions in the metro area. Contemporary Landscapes might better be titled “Landscape and the Uncanny.” One way or another, it confronts the unease imposed on us by a once-familiar world that has grown strange.
This is symbolized effectively by Adam Gabriel Winnie’s painting Pessoa’s Disquiet, a title that alludes to Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. In it, a forest clearing is lit by sunlight from several angles at once, as a man hunched over in a chair manipulates a shutter trigger that is attached to a manual typewriter instead of a camera. The typewriter sits on a desk alongside a strange disk that appears to be a gigantic glass platter. The near-photographic precision of the rendering makes the scene seem realistic, until a closer look reveals the anomalous details.
Peter Essick’s color photographs of metro Atlanta construction sites do much the same thing with Snellville, Suwanee and Stone Mountain, where torn-up landscapes and construction equipment appear more alien than any casual observer would expect. It is, literally, the condition that Ben Steele evokes in science-fiction-like landscape paintings with such titles as The Shape of Things to Come (a title borrowed from sci-fi writer H. G. Wells).
Ron Saunders and cuibonobo take this motif into interactive digital dimensions with Terra Incognita 2.0, where the “unknown land” of the title is a set of superimposed images that can be manipulated by scanning a QR code. This literal presentation of multiple perspectives is rendered more symbolically in paint with Namwon Choi’s acrylic and gouache landscapes on canvas or panel, in which independent bits of scenery appear in adjacent but separate segments best described by the title of one work, In-betweenness (Landscape – Fragmented).
The rest of the show uses diametrically opposed methods to convey a sense of something not quite right in the world as we behold it. Hannah Ehrlich’s consistently dark-colored textile weavings suggest aerial views of the land below. They are also visual metaphors for unsettled emotional states — as implied by such titles as I am reminded and now it is all happening again. Chris Little’s photographs, on the other hand, seem on one level like standard-issue Romanticism, with a touch of the awe and terror of the sublime in the mountain landscape of Guardians of the Tetons.
But the loneliness of an isolated farmhouse in British Columbia or an unaccountably windowless house in South Dakota introduces a sense of the uncanny, and the road repair that rhymes with the patchwork landscape on a Patchwork Road likewise reveals an unsuspected strangeness in the mid and far West.
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Dr. Jerry Cullum’s reviews and essays have appeared in Art Papers magazine, Raw Vision, Art in America, ARTnews, International Journal of African-American Art and many other popular and scholarly journals. In 2020 he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for his outstanding contribution to arts journalism.
