“Now more than ever before, experiences of place and nature may be acquired through mediated virtual and visual realities. This distancing and removal from actual natural scenery and its filtration through urban planning, landscape design, advertising and home improvement comes at a time when our relationship to nature is irrevocably changed. Perhaps it is also because of a contemporary sense of placelessness and trans-locational identity that scenic landscape imagery has become important again, and manifests in so many modes of visual representation. Landscapes are the sought and kept souvenirs of abstracted and often exaggerated perceptions of the world around us.”

Elizabeth Gerdeman is a visual artist who considers the conflicting ways we conceive of the natural world. Her recent projects deal with the human relationship to landscape – the tangible physical space occupied as well as the intangible concepts, narratives, and experiences of place – and the cultural confines through which images of landscape are constructed. Gerdeman’s approach is multidisciplinary, working with an array of materials and images to create mixed-media collages, room-scale paintings, interior decor inspired installations and experimental videos. Her work often interrogates the cultural construction of landscape as practiced by contemporary industries taking visual cues from, for example, tourism or home improvement advertisements using images of nature as design element and branding tool.

During the Artist Talk on March 7th, Elizabeth Gerdeman will show and discuss recent and upcoming projects, as well as the influences that continue to fuel her artistic research and practice.