Ellen Wixted, “Raw Land” - December 2002
Using the formal language of representational painting, my work explores the tension between our expectations of landscape painting and the unsettling landscapes that are the by-product of development. Raw land is the term realtors use to describe undeveloped land. It seems to me that land being developed becomes invisible-it's neither wilderness nor home. I'm as interested in making the invisible seen as I am exploring the visual consequences of spelling out our material desires so plainly on the land.
But there's also an element of alchemy at play. Woods become a neighborhood. A place you'd drive past without ever noticing it becomes an image that haunts you. There's a sort of redemption in looking carefully and seeing clearly: for me, looking for beauty in the banal landscapes of our time has at its heart the desire to reconcile love and loss, and to find the sacred in the profane.
Bringing all of this to the process of painting has necessitated a search for visual metaphors that transcend the overt subject matter of my images: I balance underlying abstractions with a mass of observed detail, and I use the random accumulation of objects in a landscape as a counterpoint to compositional clarity. I want to create paintings that are worthy of sustained looking, paintings that meld formal concerns, observed reality, and emotion into objects that hover between their own material substance, the represented image, and something less easily named.
Raw Land will be on view at Gallery 110, 110 S. Washington Street, Seattle from December 4-28, 2002. On December 4th, there is a preview from 5-8pm and on December 5th, First Thursday, the gallery is open from 6-8pm.
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