What does it mean to photograph the landscape in a post-New Topographics, post-iPhone age? “Lost in Space,” a group show on view until June 29 at Rick Wester Fine Art in New York City, answers that question with a range of responses from eight photographers whose diverse work pushes in many directions. Among them are Aaron Rothman’s digitally purified fields of flowers, Christopher Colville’s cameraless studies of the Arizona desert at night and Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman’s whimsical and dire junk food landscapes. There are political landscapes, such as the fragments of trees from Diana Matar’s series “Witness,” which traces state sponsored violence, and personal landscapes, such as Molly Lamb’s dark fragments of roots and water. In David Magnusson’s portraits of fathers and daughters who attend Purity Balls, the landscape is an empty if telling backdrop, while in Lilly McElroy’s images, foreground and background condense as the artist’s hand reaches into the sky to grab the sun. The artists here, writes the gallery in a statement, reflect “some of the current trends in landscape photography, ranging from the lyrical to the dissonant, from the personal to the disassociated…Landscape, as a concept is more implied and subverted than clearly stated.”
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