Land.Escape
Curated by Eva Karapanou
VTO Gallery
96 Teesdale street,
London, E2 6PU

29 June - 21 July 2002

The artists in 'Land .Escape' present landscapes which are not studies of nature but comments on how we approach it and use its imagery through technology. Landscape is the work of the mind, it's scenery is built up from layers of memory, it brings 'presence' and 'distance' together. 'Land.Escape' paints digital moments, photographs memories, blurs the real and the imagined with the desirable. The re-invented seas and forests in this exhibition are not instantly readable.They are seductive but not idyllic, Romantic but not parochial. They are manipulated while they remain 'untouched'.

Jen Wei Kuo shows 'Adrift', a large drawing depicting the sea, this vast mirror that reflects one's mind, the rise, the fall, the flow and the ebb. Made of charcoal dust and composed of lines and dots this image, when viewed from afar has a photographic quality.

Nina Grieg's poster is a photograph of a forest, a picture taken to construct a memory of a place from her family's history. She made her desirable place visible and wishes to share it with the exhibition visitors, copies of 'Isdalen' are available for them. Printed on clear film these posters function as screens to stories behind them.

Eva Karapanou's composite landscapes are titled 'Edge'. She creates textures with layers of flashy colours to simulate the dazzling computer game images of valleys and seashores.They resemble remote places seen in holiday brochures in the sixties, 'impressive' on their own. They are tricks of the light, stages for leisure and adventure.

Dan Hays presents a forest, a pixelated oil painting based on a compressed computer image. Fascinated by the paradox of reading an image as a screen and a painting simultaneously he emulates the qualities of the video stills of his namesake from Colorado, in paint.

Helen Sear's photograph, a faux landscape seen through perspex titled 'Grounded', questions 'nature' and culture. It is a digital montage, a juxtaposition of a cloudy sky that hangs over a part of an animal body. In 'Day for night', her new b&w series, she uses a double mirror image of a snowscape to explore ideas of absence and presence, object and shadow, positive and negative.