One of my intentions when I traveled to Alaska in 2021 was to confront some personal mythologies. Though I was born there, my family left before I turned two. Despite this, I long gave the state a central position in my personal geography, ascribing imagined meaning to a place I barely knew. In a gallery at the Anchorage Museum packed with dramatic paintings of the area’s famously rugged landscapes, a wall text highlighted the ways in which visiting artists often took a Romantic view, portraying “an unpopulated and untouched wilderness from a distance,” and focusing on “beauty and the sublime.” In contrast, “Drawings and carvings [by Indigenous artists] were not based on looking at the land, but living with it, with lifeways advanced through continuing adaptation.”
This was one of many perspective shifts I experienced on that trip, and it immediately came to mind as I entered Romance, Regret, and Regeneration in Landscape at The 8th Floor gallery. The exhibition, curated by Anjuli Nanda Diamond and George Bolster, provides a nuanced look at the role of landscape-based art in our rapidly changing world. Works like Alexis Rockman’s thickly painted “Lake Athabasca” (2024) or Richard Mosse’s spectrally enhanced photograph, “Intensive Cattle Feedlot, Rondônia” (2020) offer the kinds of hyper-saturated images of environmental devastation that are common in shows about human-caused climate change. But as I progressed through the artworks, an increasing complexity began to emerge.
Still from Francis Alÿs, in collaboration with Cuauhtémoc Medina and Rafael Ortega, “When Faith Moves Mountains (making of)” (2002), single-channel video, color, sound, 15:09 min.
For instance, “When Faith Moves Mountains (making of)” (2002), a video work by Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtémoc Medina, depicts hundreds of volunteers recruited to help move a 1,500-foot-wide sand dune a few inches. On first view, it feels like a cousin to Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams (1982), also a “making of” film set in Peru, this one about Werner Herzog’s ill-fated movie Fitzcarraldo (1982). In Burden of Dreams, Herzog, a White European director, is far from home and determined to achieve his cinematic desires, which quite literally required moving part of a mountain and dragging a steamboat up it, all at tremendous risk to the Machiguenga people, who live in the area and worked on the film. But the documentation of Alÿs’s project focuses primarily on the experience of the local participants. From their initial impressions of what seemed to them like a “silly” project, they begin to speak about the collective organizing it required (particularly notable as the film was made during the Fujimori dictatorship), and we learn about the relationships they developed to the final work. Instead of a portrait of the generative artist, the video gives those who helped realize his vision a chance to reflect on its meaning.
Shifting viewpoints is also central to the video work “A History of Stone, Origin and Myth” (2016) by Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan. As massive blocks of stone are quarried in Ireland, the narrator speaks of “the labor of history.” Striations make visible a geological vision of time — a record etched into earth. Bringing together resource extraction, the fabrication of colonial monuments from those prehistoric stones, and the ways in which the slowly degrading monuments attempt to fix a limited version of history in an ancient material, the film is a reminder of a timescale that long precedes us and will endure well beyond us.
Still from Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan, “A History of Stone, Origin and Myth” (2016), 4k Cinemascope and HD video installation, single channel, color, sound, 20 min.
Similarly, a collection of artworks and artifacts from the Chagossian people, including paintings by Clement Siatous and vitrines filled with archival materials from the Chago Research Initiative, asks for a reframing of time and history. Unlike many other Indigenous groups, Chagossian history goes back only to the late 18th century, when formerly enslaved Africans, as well as people from Malaysia and India, were brought to the archipelago by French colonists to work on plantations. The formation of their unique, fused culture and the desire to preserve it in the face of expulsion from the islands by the British in the 1970s begs broader questions about the emergence of hybrid cultures and relationships to place resulting from the movement of groups across geographies; the latter feels particularly relevant at a time of increased global displacement. Siatous’s vivid paintings of daily life on his home island of Diego Garcia directly counter British claims that the archipelago never had its own people.
Such tensions between contradictory perspectives on our shared terrain makes this a rich exhibition. Its representations of landscapes, intimate or grandiose, remind us to consider whose viewpoint is on display, and to what end.
Clement Siatous, “Untitled” (2005), acrylic on linen
Installation view of Romance, Regret, and Regeneration in Landscape at The 8th Floor. Left: two works by Yang Yongliang; right: watercolors by Alexis Rockman
Alexis Rockman, “Lake Athabasca” (2024), oil and cold wax on wood
Still from Ishmael Marika, “Wanga Watangumirri Dharuk” (2011), single-channel digital video, color, sound, 15:42 min.
Joseph Beuys, “Difesa della Natura” (1984), color offset lithograph on paper
Romance, Regret, and Regeneration in Landscape continues at The 8th Floor (17 West 17th Street, Flatiron, Manhattan) through December 13. The exhibition was curated by Anjuli Nanda Diamond and George Bolster.
