‘Positions: New Landscapes’ in Chicago Makes Space for Something Better
Leticia Pardo’s installation migajas (32.53384˚N, 117.12311˚W) is a series of white paper squares in frames suspended from the gallery ceiling. They effectively form a kind of wall or barrier sectioning off a corner of the space. It’s not clear whether you’re “allowed” to walk behind them.
This uncertainty is appropriate because the squares are paper embossed with fragments of the U.S./Mexico border wall that fell to the ground while two men were climbing over it to enter the States. If you do go around to the illicit “back” of the piece, you can see slight rust stains and discolorations left by the embossing process; the traces of a crumbling barrier circumvented once by the men climbing over the wall and then again by you, moving around the gallery. Pardo—who herself moved from Mexico City to Chicago—uses the movement of materials and people to suggest that the barriers separating land and people can be crossed both physically and conceptually. Those crossings, in turn, can perhaps bring down the barriers themselves, leaving us free to move and to think in different ways.
Pardo’s wonderful piece is part of a six-artist show at the Hyde Park Art Center on the south side of Chicago titled “Positions: New Landscapes.” According to exhibitions and residency manager Mariela Acuña, who curated the show, landscape painting and photography in the past has been “very rooted in colonial thinking,” with imagery that told the story of white men finding and then taking land ripe for resource extraction. The art in “Positions” pushes back against that way of representing and possessing land and landscape both by critiquing earlier formulations and by trying to think through other ways of connecting land and art.
The piece that most directly engages with past landscape art is Kelly Kristin Jones’ Old Masters. The work consists of thirty-nine pages from the textbook American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School by John K. Howat. Jones erased all the images from the pages, collected the pigment shavings and put them in 298 glass specimen jars. The jars are on a pedestal in the gallery; that part of the work is titled Tomorrow Is Another Day.
“This is actually my college textbook,” Jones told Observer. “I was required to buy it and use it as part of a class. And it always irritated me. It just felt so good, so satisfying to destroy this book and the images inside.”
Jones pointed out that while the Hudson River School has been largely erased from history—known but not well-known in the way of the Cubists or Impressionists or Abstract Expressionists—its paintings of carefully arranged vistas, without people, waiting to be occupied by the white male gaze of a white male explorer, remain influential. Ansel Adams is one heir, and its echoes can be found in advertising imagery and the way we tend to think about American spaces.
“The nearly forgotten or banal, I think, makes way for the horrific,” Jones clarified. “All of these kinds of images circulating in the subconscious are quite dangerous.” By literally scratching out the paintings and preserving the pigment, Jones urges the viewer to think about how we might replace these imagined landscapes with something less violent and more collaborative.
Other works point towards possible new approaches to landscape art. Elsa Muñoz’s paintings of controlled burns evoke J.M.W. Turner’s dramatic storm-tossed landscapes but at a smaller scale and with a greater intimacy. Rather than orchestrating sweeping effects, Muñoz’s work feels like she’s walking through and collaborating with the landscape. ‘Controlled burn’ refers to the practice of burning underbrush to keep the forest healthy but also suggests the painter’s practice of representing land with care.
Norman Long’s Calumet In Dub shows video of rock patterns, grass and
Artist zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal’s work also looks at the intersection of humanity and nature. Her serene, large-scale photos of the
Lydia Cheshewalla, an Osage artist who moved to Chicago from Omaha in 2022, creates intricate geometric structures out of seed pods glued to the gallery wall. The pods, she told Observer, are mostly gathered from Chicago, but “there are some things that I’ve been carrying with me for a long time—and I think that’s kind of true of a lot of us.” She keeps careful notes of where she gathered each seed, and when the show is over, she returns each to its original location.
“This is organic material, and I think it’s really important that we think about organic processes,” she explained. “Things move in cycles; they’re not meant to stay in a static position. They die, they rot, they compost and then they go into renewal. And I think it’s important to honor that cycle.”
She also considers the relationships inherent in nature: something humans are part of even as they try to distance themselves from it. “These are kinships. These are my relatives. I want to honor that. When I bring these relatives into a gallery space and hold a conversation with them, that is asking us to look at our relationships differently—to look at how we locate ourselves differently.”
Acuña added that Cheshewalla’s work is designed to be unarchivable. That makes it an implicit, quiet rebuke to the way that art historians and collectors have often stolen Indigenous people’s art and even Indigenous people’s remains.
Museums have in the past been themselves a technology and technique of occupation; how art is arranged and viewed is in part about controlling land, and thereby controlling people. “Positions: New Landscape” rearranges and rethinks that uncomfortable history, creating a space where artists and viewers are free to look at the other side of ideas, barriers and walls.
“Positions: New Landscapes” is at Hyde Park Art Center through February 23, 2025.