Victoria Adams

The painting “Imagined West” was conceived in response to the theme of the Tacoma Art Museum’s 2004 exhibition Lewis & Clark Territory: Contemporary Artists Revisit Place, Race and Memory.

As TAM associate curator Rock Hushka’s catalog essay for the Lewis & Clark exhibit states:  “We view the journals [of Lewis and Clark] not merely as a record of human achievement but through layers of historical experience that continually reshape our values and needs in terms of self-identity.”

As a contemporary artist working in the landscape genre, I am continually probing the notion that our national and personal self-identity is bound up with our perception of our landscape, and especially the lands of the Western states.  In “Imagined West,” I combined the ideals that we as contemporary Americans hold about the West with those that our forebears held as they first explored uncharted territory.  Some of these forebears remained in the East, never actually making the trip in covered wagons, but imagining what the new territory might look like, aided in their imaginings by the landscape paintings of Europeans of their time.  To this day, contemporary explorers in SUVs and Winnebagos all come to the West with some personal vision of what the West will and should look like, based in part on the memory of previously seen Romantic landscape painting.  It was this collective vision, past and present, that I tried to depict in “Imagined West.”

Chief among the features of this painting are its large scale and its golden light.  In reality and in imagination, the collective vision of the West is one of overwhelming open space and grand scale.  The plains, unforested, were the realm of light to early explorers.  In the realm of myth, the world is divided into realms of darkness and realms of light.  By using a golden palette in “Imagined West,” I sought to represent the hopes for prosperity that has brought settlers then and now to the lands of the West, naturally open and full of light.

But coupled with this edenic vision of the West is a balancing and darker shadow-side of the vision which I’ve also tried to depict.  The very openness and light of the West has also been problematic and relentless. The solitude and silence of the place has the power to produce a profound uneasiness.  The emptiness of it can be a terrifying prospect unless we are able to imagine it as other than an open, dry, windy void.  Thus the collective vision of the West is not so much that of a “landscape”—carrying connotations of a pleasing pictorially reassuring sense of place—as it is a neutral “space”—an empty three-dimensional field.  As a nationally shared, immense, culturally vacant area, the land of the West has come to be seen as worthless until claimed as a commodity—space for the taking—where the consequences of countless decisions by real-estate investors, speculators, and developers have shaped its modern-day reality.  

Both visions that are part of our national and personal ideology of space-- that of the edenic place of hope and that of the empty field--are contained in the painting “Imagined West.”

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