[dropcap style=”font-size:100px;color:#992211;”]H[/dropcap]uxley-Parlour gallery present Mud Season, an exhibition of new works by American artist Lisa Sanditz. One of the most celebrated landscape painters working in the US today, Sanditz’s richly coloured works explore humanity’s impact on the natural world.
Sanditz depicts the landscape as a reflection of contemporary cultural values. The artist makes drawings and takes photographs on site, recreating altered versions of the scenes in her studio, where spaces are heightened and the saturated colours invert and bleed. The effect is one of disorientation and destabilisation, and the works, made during lockdown in the spring of 2020, reimagine and rework the tradition of the Romantic landscape in the time of global health pandemics and Trump-era America.
Capturing the intersection of the natural world and built environments, and the associated effect on food production, consumption, ecology, and the economy, the paintings render prosaic scenes or situations in brilliant and garish colours. The saturated palette and use of industrial materials reference the impact of plastic and other synthetics on the environment. As the artist states: “These new allegorical paintings sparked from distant and recent personal memories, aim to stick joy, remorse, love and sorrow together in sumptuous and scummy surfaces. These paintings are bruised and loved. The colours are lovely, brazen, exhilarating and gross.”
The exhibition consists of seven large-scale works that form unsettling modern allegories. Fumigation tents spread out across a perfectly Romantic panoramic expanse, and a speeding car, ‘a mid-life joyride’, cuts through a dreamlike, treelined avenue. Grandma unexpectedly points a gun towards the ceiling at the edge of a domestic interior, and a couple feed tropical fish processed cheese from a can in a balmy, exotic sea. Sanditz is a master of irony and subversion. Snapshots of a seemingly recognisable life are gently twisted, heightened and upended.
A further seven smaller-scale works, from the series Upside Down Walks, alter gravity. Repeated exposure to the phrase ‘upside down world!’ lead Sanditz to play with the laws of physics and recreate a new version of reality in her compositions. The small rural roads near her home in upstate New York allowed the artist to find moments of solace and clarity during lockdown.
The area is noted for its historic links to the Hudson River school style of painting, which Sanditz sees as “jammed with squeaky-clean realism, macho colonialism and especially lush views”. The series “leans into this Romantic idea of landscape while pushing against its conventions, trading manifest destiny and patriotism for pain and guilt and uncertainty with a bold sprinkling of joy.”
Mud Season runs from 22 September – 24 October at Huxley-Parlour Gallery.
Image: Lisa Sanditz, Grandma’s Got a Gun, 2020 © Lisa Sanditz
Naila Scargill is the publisher and editor of horror journal Exquisite Terror. Holding a broad editorial background, she has worked with an eclectic variety of content, ranging from film and the counterculture, to political news and finance.
