Gallery Kayafas is pleased to present LANDSCAPE AS FETISH, a group exhibit curated by Greer Muldowney. Muldowney has selected seven artists where the landscape is an integral part of their work: Timothy Briner, Jesse Burke, Christine Collins, Mark Dorf, Jonathan Gitelson, Angela Mittiga, and Anastasia Samoylova.

To fetishize is to mold an object of desire into an imagined state of perfection. When considering the landscape as fetish, the world is most often pictured as a bucolic masterpiece, a perfected and composed environment seeking out the sublime. However, there is no such landscape that ever achieves the perfection of the visual, as almost all lands have become commodified, designed and molded. Pictures of the scarred landscape are a new phenomena, but even these images construct the ideal of how the land was shaped for the better, or used for the betterment. The imagery in Landscape as Fetish is an ever-present reminder of our treatment and desire of the land.

For the purposes of this exhibition, the human quest to be part of an idealized ‘nature’ is explored as a conscious construct instead of the discovered pastoral. Artists have reinterpreted and regurgitated the landscape either as the object of their personal desire, or an effacement of our societal construct, or a place that only exists as a repository for reflection and mood. These image makers beg you to look at the landscape not as a reality, but as their own vision and design through humor, beauty and the consciousness of the cliché.