An exhibition that redefines the landscape of truisms.

Landscape is a common word, understood by most people as meaning the visible features of a countryside or land. The land we see before us. A word so commonly used in the English language that its definition often goes unchallenged. It is a given, a truism in language. I look at the land and what I am looking at is a landscape. It is what it is. Some things never change. But language does change, it is alive, it is fluid and it is steeped in the history of the people who bring it form and keep it alive. It is often the dominant language of the victors, which in turn becomes subverted by the oppressed as a form of resistance. Language, like land, is forever forming and reforming, buckling under seismic forces of change, rising and merging and traveling and transforming.

"Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body."
- bell hooks
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

The artists featured in Landviews of Commonplaces bring their artistic worldview into the language of the landscape. They refuse to postulate the tired relationship our modern world has wrought on the land that sustains us and they burrow down to find new language that addresses our emotional, psychological and physical reliance on the natural world.