In this project, we approach the idea of landscape conceptually, with an understanding that landscape is a mental construction—a perception that one has or creates of his or her surroundings in order to recognize, describe, or understand them. And while landscape often brings to mind bucolic vistas, the term is loaded with meanings and references to everything from geography, climate, and architecture to identity, politics, and economics. 

Much like culture, the landscape of a place is neither static nor monolithic. It is an aggregation of parts and experiences, direct and indirect. Given this time of heightened uncertainty and economic upheaval, we want to explore how social, political, and economic forces are manifested in the physical landscape, and how they might play out in what becomes our collective mental landscape.

 The photographs in the installation were taken along the roadways of the Midwest. They are intermingled with road maps, audio interviews, video, texts, and farm artifacts to create a sprawling narrative of place; in this case, Ohio. The texts were culled from a year’s worth of USA TODAY’s “Across the USA,” which daily prints a paragraph of news from every state. The audio landscape combines a local radio “trading post” program with rural sounds and the voices of Kenyon students in conversation with neighboring Ohio residents. We envision the installation as a nonlinear, multi-centric web that travels among the hundreds of framed micro-landscapes to evoke larger local- and global-scapes.

 Mental Landscape builds on some of our earlier work that examines how the lines between advertising and political propaganda have blurred, and how marketing techniques have come to dominate our communication, so that even Jesus is one more product to be sold.  The installation further explores how the automobile has usurped our public spaces. Not only do vehicles dictate how our physical landscape is configured, they condition how we relate to each other. The term “safety cage,” which the auto industry uses to refer to the body of the car, speaks volumes about how we live. One has the sense that as we all hurtle together toward the future, we are—each of us—alone, protected only by varying degrees of real or perceived security.

JPparalelos (Juan-Sí González + Paloma Dallas)

Gambier, Ohio, November 2009

The artists wish to thank Olin Art Gallery director Dan Younger for his enthusiastic collaboration in this project and for sharing his personal farm-related artifacts with us; Claudia Esslinger and her family for all their solidarity; gallery assistant Adam Hinterlang and Madeline Courtney; work study students Richard Freund, Katie Furlett, Alyssa Van Denburg, Lizzie Bernstein, Victoria Lederer, and Marta Stewart-Bates for their generous time and dedication in the installation of the show; and Aspen Golann for her design of the atrium banner.  We also want to thank all of the students and Ohio residents who shared their stories and experiences for the audio landscape. We thank Alyssa and Rachel for kidnapping our daughter and giving us a few more hours to work; Abby and George and Paula and Steve for all their support; and our beautiful Camila for her patience and understanding while we worked late into the night.

Finally, we extend thanks to Kenyon College and the Art and Art History Department for making this project possible. Mental Landscape is supported, in part, by the Mesaros Fund for Art.