Content area
Full Text
VISUAL ART
"Unsettled Landscapes"
"SITElines: New Perspectives on Art of the Americas," a six-year venture linking a series of exhibitions that explore contemporary art and cultural production in the Western Hemisphere, is alive with the unexpected. As a relaunch of SITE Santa Fe, the art pilgrimage inaugurated in 1995, it is a presentation of a brave new vision of commitment to community and place, and to new, and perhaps sometimes under-recognized art that follows what Chief Curator Irene Hoffmann calls "the radical rethinking of the biennial form." The first of these promising exhibitions, "Unsettled Landscapes," opened in July 2014.
We emerge into this world of imagined places via the SITE building, itself an artwork. Redesigned by Greg Lynn, the American architect/designer best known for his work in robotics, as an intervention piece in SITE'S "More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness" exhibition in 2012, the space has a seamless quality. It allows and even encourages viewers to see the exhibition in a state of compasslessness, from northern Canada to southern South America and inside all the stories that these landscapes have to tell.
As we move through the spaces and the stories unfold, we begin to understand that the scope and scale of this ambitious project weaves geographical, cultural, linguistic and psychological multiplicities into one dynamic continuity. From Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, we learn about historical narratives and personal and transpersonal urgencies. We experience their politics and are provoked...