Feb 26, 20192 min read

Artists explore meaning of landscapes

Valley’s new month-long “From the Outside in” art show challenges artists to illustrate their own vision of the outdoors.

By Mickie Shaw, Multimedia Editor

Valley College’s new three-person art show “From the Outside in” is a contemporary landscape show where the theme is interpreted by each artist.

“Even though they are all different mediums, they all really flow together and speak to each other in a really nice way,” said curator Sam Hopple.

Los Angeles artist Katie Shapiro’s pictures are all of impact craters, the landscapes are scarred with giant round depressions. One picture is decorated with cut outs of colored gels. The colors contrast with the light grey texture of the crater.

“I am interested in impact craters. I like the idea that with an impact to the earth it leaves a mark, but impacts to us like emotional impacts- there are no physical marks,” said Shapiro. “They are all just layers in our psyche. There’s sort of a poetic-ness to that.”

New York-based artist Hunter Buck made a six-by-nine canvas while in Hawaii that covers one of the gallery’s egg shell white walls. Its black charcoal rubbings covers the entire white canvas; the circular markings are impressions from a lava flow.

“This is a rubbing of a lava flow from the 1500s,” said Hunter. “I thought I would document these lava flows … by making a physical print and painting from the material in the landscape.”

Eight rectangular translucent boxes placed in a horizontal line along one wall document performances by LA-based artist Allison Peck. Each side of a box has a separate image. The box’s display mechanism is like a zoetrope, where the viewer is seeing multiple images at once.

“I’m trying to show in a way I’m not separate from the landscape, I’m sort of moving with it,” Peck said. “For me, it’s about finding resonance with the landscape, so I think about it in an energetic way.”

“From the Outside in” is a journey through the landscape of the mind were the viewer can experience the artists’ individual interpretations of landscapes. The eclectic exhibition will run from Feb. 13 through March 14.