Aspiring to the Landscape
Subtitle: On Painting and the Subject of Nature
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: February 12, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 270
ISBN-13: 9780802038944
Subjects: Individual artists; Nature in art, still life, landscapes & seascapes; Sociology; Social Science; Pop Arts / Pop Culture; Canada; Popular Culture - General; Social Science / Popular Culture
First sentence: Entering Wanda Koop's installation Paintings for Dimly Lit Rooms, which was exhibited together with Paintings for Brightly Lit Rooms at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1997, was like stepping into a nineteenth-century encircling panorama (Figure 1.1).
Description: "The idea of nature as a cultural construction has been discussed extensively in postmodern theory. Less attention, however, has been paid to the underlying motivations shaping the ideologies of nature, in particular the desire to submit to some larger order outside of oneself. Aspiring to the Landscape examines this persistent desire and how it is made manifest in contemporary landscape art."

"Four installations of large-scale paintings by Canadian artists Eleanor Bond, Susan Feindel, Stephen Hutchings, and Wanda Koop are the focus of Petra Halkes's study. The works vary widely in style and iconography but are drawn together by the way they invite viewers to reflect on the troubled relationship between culture and nature, and on the contradictory and simultaneous longing to conquer and to succumb to nature." "It is the tension between modern and postmodern interpretations of the subject of nature that makes the theory and the artwork discussed in Aspiring to the Landscape so important to Canadian culture."--Jacket.