Boston Cyberarts at Atlantic Wharf presents Vast Vistas: Landscape in New Media

Georgie Friedman, "Geyser," two-channel video, 18:33 min, 2009

BOSTON, MA.- Boston Cyberarts presents its second exhibition in Atlantic Wharf's new dedicated art gallery - Vast Vistas: Landscape in New Media, an exhibition of work by four artists - Julia Hechtman, Georgie Friedman, Jane Marsching and Luke Strosnider. On view at Atlantic Wharf, 290 Congress Street, Boston, from December 12 through February 10, 2012. Landscapes are more the product of culture than nature. When artists try to reproduce the world in its natural state, they create a vision of how they wish nature would be. This is as true of the Hudson River School as it is of Ansel Adams. How does new media reflect the natural world? One would think that the most technological of art forms would not be a good fit with nature, but as the artists in this exhibition illustrate, new media can reveal an undiscovered depth to nature that a painting, for instance, cannot. Julia Hechtman's Quadrants is a single-channel video that composites two separate videos into one with four fields. Two of the fields show a figure sitting, facing the camera. The two others show a figure, back towards the camera. The end result is a contemplative space, where the real focus is on the grace of the seabirds who fly around the edge of the fields, and the sound of a waterfall, barely visible in the distance. Georgie Friedman's Geyser, a two channel piece of different views of the same geyser are intentionally not synchronized, and the full scene is never revealed. In one, we see the crusty base: the water grows, quivers, rises, falls, until it suddenly surges and bursts filling the frame with whitish-blue water, only to start the process again. In the second, the frame stays focused on the sky. Clouds shift and pass, then, without warning, water shoots up either in one big explosion or in a quick succession of smaller outbursts. By dividing this one location and separating the linked events, time becomes fragmented and new relationships between expectation, anticipation and reward are created. Jane Marsching's Arctic Listening Post, Future North: Ecotarium and Rising North imagines our future in the next hundred years after irreversible climate change. Massive migrations of urban populations will move north to escape severe flooding and increasing temperatures. Areas inside the Arctic regions will warm up significantly, making their occupation newly desirable. In this animation, entire cities float away from their flooded moorings and meet in a new North, reimagining the entire surface of our planet in the future - subtly warning us about the present. Luke Strosnider created Ansel Adams | New Landscapes, (from his artist-book Ansel Adams | New Landscapes) by scanning many of Adams's most powerful images of the American West and then generating their histograms in Photoshop. He then chose those histograms for visual forms that reinforced traditional notions of landscape in the original pictures. Photoshop has remediated Ansel Adams's brilliant Zone System, and the precise control offered by both are closely related. The histograms of his landscapes form a two-way bridge between eras of photographic practice and remind us that as our technologies of expression rapidly evolve, it is vital to consider our image-making tools as much as we do our images. Julia Hechtman is an inter-disciplinary artist. She received a BFA in Photography at Syracuse University, New York and an MFA in photography, film and video from the University of Illinois at Chicago, IL. She has recently exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum, MA; Currier Museum of Art, NH; Bakehouse Art Center, Miami, FL; the Sydney Olympic Park; and the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel, among others. Hechtman teaches in Northeastern University's Art + Design Department in Boston, and lives and works in Jamaica Plain, MA. Georgie Friedman has her Masters of Fine Arts (Video, Film & Photography) from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in conjunction with Tufts University and her Bachelors of Art (Studio Art: Photography) from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current projects include video installations, video and film experimental narratives and several photographic series. Friedman has lived, worked and exhibited throughout the U.S. including Portland, OR, New Orleans, Boston & New York City. Professionally, she has taught at Boston College, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MassArt, Art Institute of Boston At Lesley University, The Boston Architectural College, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Digital media artist, Jane D. Marsching explores our past, present and future human impact on the environment through interdisciplinary and collaborative practices, including video installations, virtual landscapes, dynamic websites, and data visualizations. Her current work mines Thoreau's many observations of seasonal plant and animal life at Walden Pond to consider the impact of climate shifts on this landscape at the heart of our American imagination of all that is nature. Luke Strosnider holds an MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop as well as degrees in History and American Studies from George Washington University in Washington, DC. A critic as well as an artist, he has published pieces in Afterimage, Rochester's City Newspaper, and the Amsterdam Spoke. His work has been shown at venues such as Columbia College in Chicago, IL; Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY; and the Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, WA.