Earth isn't always what we try to make of it

Land is not necessarily rural, and despite urbanist claims, place need not be a built environment or opportunity for development. "Land Portrait," curated by Brian R. Jobe, brings works by 11 artists of the Culture Laboratory Collective to UTSA Satellite Space that consider land as something much more familiar: known through collective memory or daily habit, but often strangely other.

Jobe's piece, Channel Modules, is a linked box-like form that lines a wall with a hollow, rectangular chamber. Crafted in model-maker's basswood, taped, and painted orange, the series of parallel lines seems to model the interior of a highway tunnel as skeletal form, a preliminary sketch in 3-D blazing with caution. Piotr Chizinski has placed a crisp, toy-sized suburb on the floor, but the white bungalows of Badlands of Modernity: Levittown seem submerged in the shiny gray floor. The illusion of floodwaters is heightened by the presence of an approaching barge. The vignette is a reminder, says Jobe, that the iconic post-war housing project named in the title was built on land that was unstable, cleared with disregard to the environment.

In Common Ground, large-format pigment prints by Shreedpad Joglekar, extreme scale is reversed: three close-ups of mudflats seem to be over-large, macroscopic murals. These literal readings of land depict earth forthrightly, but expose the compositional gambits that photographers impute to nature. The Gorge (With Legend) by Sue Anne Rische depicts a set of teeth that is so big it passes the threshold of revulsion. Drawn in charcoal with silver leaf, the giant choppers cover and flatten out the wall, scaled-up, they turn realism into symbol: a code for canyons.

Instead of body-as-terrain, Making Time: Erosion by Ryder Richards and Loren Erdrich's Exit Strategy show the body against terrain. They are two of the most compelling works in the exhibition. Richards' piece is a sculpture made of 2x4-inch lumber, plastic, and gold leaf, and a video documenting its construction. Boards are bound to his legs like stilts. As he hammers and fusses with materials, he seems literally suspended by his work. Erdrich's photographs show a woman climbing to the top of a ladder that emerges impossibly aslant from a field to the sky. From the top, her arm reaches heavenward. Erdrich's images are sweetly charming; they were used on the exhibition postcard. But in the exhibition room tucked off the side from the main room, the photos are discovered to be minuscule, much smaller prints than the same images on the show card. Tacked above little ledges, each photograph is accompanied by a magnifying glass to make viewing of details possible. Once again, scale is deceiving; land is a distance too far. •

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