Relational Landscapes
Oct 4, 2025–Jan 10, 2026
a presentation exploring land as a relational space, where notions of natural beauty are shaped by intertwined histories of migration, ecology, aesthetics, and cultural complexities.
Colin Brant
In Poetics of Relation, the late Martinique-born writer and thinker Édouard Glissant presents land not as fixed territory but as a space continuously shaped through memory, exchange, imagination, and lived experience. Relational Landscapes draws on this view to explore how artists engage with land in all its expansive connotations as a site of connection, beauty, and layered presence.
Rooted as we are in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains, the exhibition departs from a longstanding tradition of landscape art in the region—to portrayals by the nineteenth-century Hudson River School to contemporary artists working further afield in more expanded notions of landscape. Yet, like their predecessors, the artists draw on landscape’s atmospheric qualities—its surface, light, and atmosphere—not to idealize, but to underscore the ongoing fragilities and inherent contractions of place.
Relational Landscapes brings together work by artists who treat landscape less as static terrain or aesthetic object than as a layered field of memory, encounter, resistance, and poetics. Inspired by Glissant’s call to imagine land as a space of relation—shaped by migration, history, ecology, and cultural multiplicity—this exhibition reframes landscape as something fundamentally in flux—inherently entangled and radically opaque—where beauty inherently coexists with impermanence.
Checklist
Press Release
Colin Brant
In Poetics of Relation, the late Martinique-born writer and thinker Édouard Glissant presents land not as fixed territory but as a space continuously shaped through memory, exchange, imagination, and lived experience. Relational Landscapes draws on this view to explore how artists engage with land in all its expansive connotations as a site of connection, beauty, and layered presence.
Rooted as we are in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains, the exhibition departs from a longstanding tradition of landscape art in the region—to portrayals by the nineteenth-century Hudson River School to contemporary artists working further afield in more expanded notions of landscape. Yet, like their predecessors, the artists draw on landscape’s atmospheric qualities—its surface, light, and atmosphere—not to idealize, but to underscore the ongoing fragilities and inherent contractions of place.
Relational Landscapes brings together work by artists who treat landscape less as static terrain or aesthetic object than as a layered field of memory, encounter, resistance, and poetics. Inspired by Glissant’s call to imagine land as a space of relation—shaped by migration, history, ecology, and cultural multiplicity—this exhibition reframes landscape as something fundamentally in flux—inherently entangled and radically opaque—where beauty inherently coexists with impermanence.
Checklist
Press Release