SeekingWilderness

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Heather Johanson

Seeking Wilderness

Heather Johanson

Curated by Alex Priest

Omaha Public Library /Michael Phipps Gallery

Mar 09 - Mar 29, 2014

Seeking Wilderness explores the potential of removing lawn to nurture a myriad of living things through research, specific plantings and chance. This process allowed for a micro wilderness to emerge in the artist’s ecologically degraded backyard in Midtown Omaha. Heather Johanson seeks to rejuvenate the landscape as an act of resistance in an era of increasingly sterilized and controlled landscapes. This sensory rich space serves as a respite from human made banality and escalating environmental anxiety. Seeking Wilderness shifts between pragmatic documentation and experiential ephemera, where the backyard becomes a place of exoticism for forgotten communities and a record in a time of cataclysmic change as a way to place our contemporary value systems within a broader historical land-based context.

This project grows from desperation, frustration and devastation. Our expansive native grasslands have been replaced by the facileness of industrial farming, big box store parking lots, mown over-watered lawn, strip malls and sterilized landscaping. Johanson’s typical city lot exists within a toxic superfund site

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and one of the most threatened and undervalued ecosystems on the planet; the prairie. Through the removal of her Kentucky Bluegrass lawn, the artist has created a space that allows for chance and a direct interaction with the larger enivonment. As a result, her backyard also transformed into a psychological secret space for freedom, wilderness, beauty and mystery.

These interventions are the artists way of coping with her frustration with cultural apathy, misguided land use, the politics of plants; anxiety of global climate change and mass extinction, and feelings of helplessness and devastation.

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When we take over landscape into geography, and particularly into public policy we inevitably import in large measure the realist, visual values with which it has been loaded: its connections with a way of seeing, its distancing of subject and object and its conservatism in presenting an image of natural and social harmony.

-Denis Cosgrove, Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea, 1985

The contemporary perception, value systems and distance humans have set with nature can be seen within the history of landscape. Prescribed and tightly controlled, landscape is a bourgeois urban concept. The mathematical power of geometry and cartography gave visual power of the environment to the human eye. Landscape articulates “the story of man’s progress across the centuries” (Newton xxii). Mira Englar states, “Before being ‘scaped,’ the land could not, in effect be seen. To be seen, it needed to be denaturalized (become an artifice), seen from a distance, and with special equipment that had a flattening effect.” This landscape idea has as much to do with humans and the environment as with society and space which is traced back to

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the 15th and 16th century as a “way of seeing the external world” (Cosgrove, 46). Devices for seeing came from both the artworld and mathematical and scientific realms. Combined, the organization of space with guaranteed mathematical certainty, revolutionized the production and commutation of human knowledge, and our place in it. Landscape since Alberti, has been appropriated, composed and rationalized to demeaning ends.

The English Landscape Gardening School of the 18th century exploited composition and land manipulation to show the detached observer the nature that was possible through the authority and divine creativity of the artist. “Linear perspective provided the certainty of reproduction of nature in art” (Cosgrove, 52). Romanticism captured the zeitgeist of England. The misleading verbal and visual dichotomy it created placed man and nature in opposition. The English Landscape Gardening School took a keen interest in 17th century landscape painters such as Claude Lorrain. Lorrain, among others, painted dramatic pictorial / theatrical compositions of winding paths, artificial ruins as follies, and a flowing array of highly articulated plants. What is ironic, and now dire, is the effect that Romanticism has on contemporary thinking about landscape. It removed humans as a biological organism in preference to the worship of “Nature.” This “Nature” was a highly contrived, highly orchestrated system designed to look the opposite making a façade of artificiality based on man’s view of the site. Landscape designers of the day, such as “Capability” Brown, would rip out historical groves, architectonic hedges in favor of

the dramatic views present in Lorrains paintings. This more “naturalistic” approach was and still is a fallacy; one that planted the seed, so to speak, of deep off kiltered relationship to the land.

Heather Johanson sees this cataclysmic relationship to the land as a personal call to action. Acting as contemporary “Capability” Brown, she is removing her Kentucky Bluegrass lawn in favor for native and volunteer species. This attack on the American Dream of owning a house with a lush green yard is one that nurtures a set of research on soon to be forgotten species, spaces and communities. The research and data accumulated are a seduction of an alternative way of living. Thinking about the future, she examines her value systems which are set within the broader context of midtown Omaha and the United States. This flawed value system has, as mentioned with Romanticism, removed humans as element of the larger ecosystem. With humans removed, issues such as mass species die out, climate change and habitat destruction play little effect on policy and communal consensus.

Johanson is going rogue. Transforming her yard into a laboratory, she is documenting, in a Karl Bodmer-esque way the species she has encountered since the transition. Many “native” species seem exotic, when unseen by the layman. Her art objects are documentation for both the near and distant future of what was growing and living in midtown Omaha. She shows that the human hand can be regenerative, as opposed to destructive.

With Nebraska being the home of Arbor Day, and Omaha the home of uncontrolled sprawl, a flawed process is at work. The idea of nature (Arbors) ends up becoming highly articulated, hyper controlled environments for tourism. Nebraskans pay to see this “natural” amusement parts that functions in much the same way was Disney World, escapism at its best. Thousands of acres of native habitats are destroyed each year for new sub-divisions, roads, parking lots and bigger-big-box stores. These once vibrant spaces become dead zones of banality and mown lawn. In car-centric Omaha, these overwatered monocultured landscape are not even designed for people. Contemporary human narcissism spawns heartbreak and hopelessness of existential removal from the systematized landscapes.

Joan Nassauer re-evaluates the need to understand why Americans have a particular relationship to landscape, and how to address this in actual designed environments stating, “nature is a cultural not ecological context.” This, especially in the Not-in-my-backyard mentality (NIMBY) results in landscapes as a self-portrait, or in the case of suburbia, a group consensus made by a few key “stakeholders”. This dystopian self-portrait is grim, at best. Nassuaer goes on, “The naturalness that Americans appreciate today is more closely related to an 18th century concept of the picturesque and the beautiful that its understand of ecological function.” As seen in the removal of prairies for the implementation of mc-mansions with sterile “local” plantings purchased at landscape superstores, the effects of the English Gardening school and one-

point perspective continue to persuade thinking about landscape, land use and planning through the further removal of humans from the natural ecosystem.

Johanson is uninterested in the alien landscapes of mown fence lines nor the awkward nostalgia of Agro-business. She takes refuge from her new-vernacular by seeking out the last pockets of wilderness – the last unregulated spaces. Yearning for this wilderness, her paintings, evidence and experimentation are not just scientific. The allure of the unknown still captivates. Her lawn is one thing she can (un)control, a place that demonstrates that humans are not separate from nature, but a vital, maternalistic supporter. In Nebraska’s once hyper-diverse setting, Johanson is asking a simple question: what is going to show up in her backyard? Culling a group of forgotten communities, Seeking Wilderness begins to break down the ever-present remnants of Romanticism and the strong hold of linear perspective. Johanson’s landscape paintings and research articulate an alternative trajectory in her personally constructed pocket of wilderness.

The inescapable history of perspective, cartography and art coalesce in landscape. Advancing in tandem, they have promoted a “supremacy in optics” (Cosgrove 54). Perspectival optics gave way to the actual appropriation of territory. Alluring, highly articulated paintings of the landscape pushed man farther and farther out of the foreground and into the background, or in the case of Lorrain the wings, as the sole proprietor of the view. “Landscape is thus a

way of seeing, a composition and structuring of the world so that it may be appropriated by a detached individual spectator to whom an illusion of order and control is offered through the composition os space according to certain geometries” (Cosgrove 55). As a way of seeing, landscape and perspective are not fully to blame for our contemporary misunderstandings of our place within the natural world. Through Johanson’s activism, visual ephemera and alternative “perspective”, our cataclysmic reality is used in much the same way as historic landscape paintings and perspective. She has appropriated her space with scientific accuracy, drastically altered and manipulated the land while aligning herself with contemporary technology.