Exposition
Pine, unprimed canvas, charcoal, gesso, gouache, pencil, pastel, 2025
69"x99"
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Exposition is a deconstructed painting that explores the ways we visually translate through the filter of personal contexts. In this work, text sets the scene as a replacement for expected visual signs and symbols. The viewer is encouraged to create their own mental image of the 19th-century painting referenced, and extrapolate from there on its significance as part of the rising action - the developing historical narrative.
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Initially installed as part of a larger exhibit in a community-forward university context, this work was accompanied by an interactive component with coloring book pages and drawing materials. The associated text for participants extrapolated on the work, which references Albert Bierstadt's The Rocky Mountains: Lander's Peak, as follows:
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This idyllic interpretation of the American West was painted by Albert Bierstadt in 1863 from sketches he made while exploring North America with the Honey Road Survey Party in 1859. In reality, this specific scene didn’t truly exist, but was a composite of different natural settings used to dramatic effect. For example, the oak-like hardwoods depicted in the original painting are not found in the Rocky Mountains, a region dominated by different types of pine, spruce, fir, juniper and aspen trees. The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak portrayed the frontier as an idealized natural paradise there for the taking.
Historian Anne F. Hyde writes in “Cultural Filters: The Significance of Perception in the History of the American West” that “Distinctive and unfamiliar landscapes presented explorers, travelers, and settlers with perceptual challenges. What was the West? What did it look like? How could it be first understood, then lived upon, made profitable, or consumed? Meeting this challenge with new methods of interpretation forced Americans to make sense of their surroundings and, at times, distort the landscape. These shifting perceptions reflected the ways in which American culture defined itself…” Paintings such as this one by Bierstadt helped provide the general public with a mental picture of the West, long before technology made every corner of the world virtually accessible to almost everyone.
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Exposition is a deconstructed painting that explores the ways we visually translate through the filter of personal contexts. In this work, text sets the scene as a replacement for expected visual signs and symbols.
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How does this image look in your mind without an actual picture to accompany the word picture? While Bierstadt’s original provides the viewer with visual imagery to give them context for something they’d never seen, this version does the reverse - it takes away the visual reference points and encourages the viewer to use solely the imagination to recreate the scene.
What do you see?
Using the tools and paper provided, draw your own interpretation of this scene.
