Show Title: remote sensing

Curated by: Chris Evans

Umbrella Gallery Announces: REMOTE SENSING

Artists include: Lindsay Burke, Brian M. John, Sean Lopez, Jessica Mallios, Manik Raj Nakra, Jessica Sawyer, and Maria Villanueva

DECEMBER 7, 2019 – JANUARY 28, 2020
OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7 / 6-8 PM

Curated by Dallas-based photographer Chris Evans, Remote Sensing, is a group exhibition of painting, sculpture, and video that explores the genre of landscape as a way of ordering and building our understanding of the world. Landscapes don’t show us anything, in particular; instead, they create a window or vantage point to be reconciled. The works in the exhibition stake claim to their vista and together construct a way to see the world around us, positing that the world we look out on is embedded with history and culture that is not always
explicitly visible.

About the Artists
Lindsay Burke’s works on paper examine the figure as landscape, blurring the lines between the body and the world that extends beyond it. Framing the body in context to landscape creates the impression of self-discovery through observation. Using a surreal approach, Burke synthesizes these elements to develop a rendering of the world around us based on the bodies we live within.

Brian M. John’s Driving Video traces the routes drove on that trip in aerial flyovers using Google Earth satellite imagery. The road trip is part of American iconography, especially in the West, and the journey of discovery is an integral part of the most important works of Land Art. These videos, pale reflections of vibrant landscapes and experiences, measure the distance between representation and reality.

Sean Lopez finds inspiration from dreams and the thin line that separates our subconscious from our waking life. The project Icon Suburbia, about the banality of growing up in the suburbs, through the use of poetry and staged interactions with performers. The work explores the relationship between the idea of suburbia and the contradictions of human interactions with the landscape.

Jessica Mallios’ Berliner Fernsehturm is a 55-minute looped video, filmed at the Berlin Television Tower, that matches the duration of a single tower rotation. The camera is focused on the glass entirely, and the marks and didactic prints on the glass emphasize the surface as a vantage. By blocking our field of view, it asserts the influence of the lens we look through and the way we see and understand the world around us.

Manik Raj Nakra explores the unreliability of perspective using anachronistic icons of Indian mythology. His paintings, framed in the silhouette of a window, describe “contemporarily relevant narratives, paranoia, and dreams of his time and place.” Jessica Sawyer’s work explores how the physical environment impacts one’s feelings of security, comfort, and belonging. Through traditional metalsmithing processes such as fabrication and enameling, Sawyer builds landscapes based on the memories, dreams, and feelings of home.

Maria Villanueva’s large-scale paintings collage together photographic image elements that are reassembled on canvas — resulting in an idealization of the landscape. The work also describes our shifting memory of place and the unreliability of one’s perspective.