A conceptual series on the territorialization of landscape

In a series with titles such as Pollution and Invasion, this series explores invasive confrontation in landscape, with dots trespassing in order to break the territory of the existing landscape painting. The work utilizes paintings by others as both material and mechanism; the act of invasion by dots is itself the subject and the process of the work. Each appropriation indulges a desire to claim ownership of landscape. This is an inclination of every human individual which quickly extrapolates to the militaristic federal and global scale.

Here on earth, we have come to experience territorialization’s many symptoms – resource extraction, war, pollution, invasion, violence and global dromology. Humans’ increasing speed and influence has direct implications upon the health and function of living landscapes. All acts upon landscape are forms of war which degrade and reform land – territorialization is underway at every moment. The act of claiming landscape that is not one’s own, particularly by a queer woman artist, points to a dialogue about violent power plays that are enacted across cities and lands – affecting all landscapes and bodies.

Using playful pessimism in my paintings and drawings, “dots” are devices for territorialization. These appropriated sites lose the gravity of earth when populated by abstract spots that float, hover, sink, and scatter across the perspectival surface within an entirely new “cartoon” atmosphere. Here, through occupation and abstraction in these landscapes, a field of dots within perspective protects us from the harsh realities of invaded and degraded landscapes with their seemingly cheerful anti-matter. These explorations interplay with Laura Stedenfeld’s career as a landscape architect: critiquing some of the prevailing ideas at the heart of the discipline while responding to a long held fascination with human settlement and the manipulation of landscapes.