Benson Campus Galleries | Greenville Technical College

Landscape Now
January 13 – February 7, 2025

Throughout history we have been awed by the power and permanence of the landscape, its bucolic balm, and its bounty of resources. Artists have recorded this beauty across time. Our industrialization has slowly challenged landscapes’ permanence and bounty through misuse and misunderstanding. Now even mountains, rivers, and seas are no longer permanent. The bucolic woodlands are subdivisions or landfills. Our once bountiful earth and its climate is becoming inhospitable and fragile. The artists in Landscape Now are addressing our landscapes and in turn climate’s hostility toward supporting our industrialized life and culture. Each artist has an individual focus, but the sum of their singular visions is a view of desolation and fragility.

Landscape Now includes six artists living and working in South Carolina. Some of them produce images based on South Carolina landscapes while others speak from national parks, but all focus on global land and climate issues.

Todd Anderson, printmaker, Associate Professor at Clemson University, “The artworks insist that climate breakdown is categorical while beauty remains. The artworks aim to speak to our contemporary moment and over time play a small role in helping future generations understand the challenges we faced as a people in the early 21st century.”
Brittany Gilbert, painter, Associate Professor at Francis Marion University, “Through sequential and perceptual landscape painting, my practice creates an archive of sustained engagement with perpetually fluctuating environments.”
Julie Mixon, photographer, Associate Professor at Francis Marion University, “When water is captured without the presence of man it could be viewed in a way in which time does not matter or is not represented.”
Amanda Musick, photographer, Lecturer of Art at Clemson University, “The processes of deconstruction and reconstruction I employ speak to our continually changing landscape as well as our attempt to preserve and piece it back together.”
Patrick Owens, photographer, Studio Manager/Gallery Assistant at Greenville Technical College, “Once verdant natural landscapes or farmland temporarily become scenes of destruction to make way for dense, fabricated, cookie-cutter communities or monolithic, cement warehouses.”
Anderson Wrangle, photographer, Associate Professor at Clemson University, “The Outer Banks of North Carolina has always been a place at an extreme limit of geographic possibility and is literally shifting sand in a dangerous sea. It is a place which is threatened by rising seas due to Climate Change and which is hampered in its natural capacity for regrowth by development.

The images in Landscape Now initially appear desolate and bleak with scant evidence of human existence, but that desolation can also be experienced as beauty. This serene beauty could contain the seeds of hope and regeneration. Our industrialization in its race to conquer the environment through research and invention could also use those resources to end land destruction and mitigate climate change.