Landscape Confection at Orange County (Ca.) Museum of Art

The Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, Calif. presents "Landscape Confection," an exhibition that showcases new works that the museum says expand the boundaries of landscape painting.

Opening Feb. 5 and remaining on view through May 7,  the exhibition features more than 50 imagined landscapes portrayed in stitched fabric, beads, wax, metal, silk flowers and other surprising materials. The emerging and mid-career artists represented in "Landscape Confection" are from England, Switzerland, France, Australia, India, Germany and the United States.

Some of the works in the exhibition are derived from topography, some from the realm of fantasy and dreamscape, while others straddle the line between traditional landscape art and abstraction. The artists in the show, many under the age of 40, embrace the idea of the decorative, with influences ranging from naturalist illustrations to impressionism to wallpaper patterns.

These works of art present beautiful representations of the landscape while, at the same time, offer intrigue through their unusual selection of materials and interpretations of the world, says Elizabeth Armstrong, the museum's chief curator. Its exciting to host an exhibition of paintings, sculptures and installations that engage on so many levels, appealing to the broad audiences of our region.

The compositions of Lisa Sanditz, for example, bear the recognizable signs of the American scene, but lack human participants. In these collisions of artificial icons and natural forms, she focuses on shopping malls, freeways, golf courses and other constructed landscapes that turn encounters with nature into mere memory.

After experiencing the medias fascination with Venus Williams hair braids at a U.S. Open, Kori Newkirk began to create landscapes reminiscent of cornrows. Hung closely together from a strip of aluminum, Newkirk employs the culturally specific pony beads to create generic landscapes such as snow-covered pines and turquoise skies.

Rowena Dring brings a craft-orientation to her mosaic landscapes where color-blocked imagery recalls the look of comic strips, maps and the once popular paint-by-number kits. Using stitched fabric, her needlework-inspired compositions examine natures own unique patterns.

Neal Rock creates candy-colored bouquets of paint using cake-decorating tools, while Ranjani Shettars installation is made of hundreds of beeswax buds connected by dyed thread and suspended from different points of the ceiling.

Other artists in the exhibition, all working in various media, are Pia Fries, Jason Gubbiotti, Jim Hodges, David Korty, Katie Pratt, Michael Raedecker, Amy Sillman and Janaina Tschäpe.




Images Courtesy of the Orange County Museum of Art. Images (top to bottom): Collection of Ron and Ann Pizzuti, Columbus, Ohio; The Baltimore Museum of Art;  purchased in Honor of Elaine B. Snyder with funds contributed by her Family and Friends; Collection Steve Shane, New York, Courtesy of Henry Urback Architecture, New York; Francie Bishop Good, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Photo courtesy of CRG Gallery, NY.