Presented in conjunction with a community-wide "celebration of landscape art," this exhibition surveys very recent work on the subject. The Lie of the Land is a theme show insofar as each of the artists in it confronts one theme: that place where the natural world meets representations of it, in short "landscape." The familiar phrase, "landscape art," is actually redundant, for, as art historians have demonstrated, the notion of landscape originated in and always presupposes art. An object of fantasy, nostalgia, or desire, landscape is a shifting field onto which we project images of ourselves.

On the other hand, The Lie of the Land is anti-thematic because it emphasizes above all difference--between artists, between each individual's understanding of nature, between recurrent uses of an unfixed but familiar semantic term. Like the parable of several blind men describing an elephant, each from his own discrete point of view, the artists in this exhibition select a distinct aspect of "landscape" to explore. From the (visual) beauty of (politically) problematic motifs to the epistemological "nature" of nature, the province they may choose to delineate is boundless. Exploring theatricality, documentary accuracy, or the pastoral mode, among other conventions, each creates art that is deeply grounded in the history of visual art, whether Sung dynasty scrolls, Claude Lorrain, Claude Monet, or Hollywood movies.

At the end of the 20th century--and the second millennium--it is no longer possible to believe in a unitary, "natural," or unproblematic symbiosis between human beings and the earth. Rather, the advances and crimes of science, the vast shifts in our understanding of ecology, the distinct constituencies for conservation, farming, or logging, and the high-key emotions that discussion on such issues provokes, make negotiating our place on the planet as urgent as it is complex. The Lie of the Land presents thirteen artists who represent the range of current work interrogating where landscape figures in contemporary culture. The ability of art to make us see anew and the propensity of the artist to envision things a different way reveal an accurately uneasy image of the complex relationship between people and their environment.