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Hostetter Gallery Presents Composite Landscapes: Photomontage and Landscape Architecture, June 27"??AESeptember 2, 2013 07-25-13 | News

Hostetter Gallery Presents Composite Landscapes: Photomontage and Landscape Architecture, June 27–September 2, 2013

The exhibit presents 50 photomontages of artists and landscape architects. A photomontage, by definition, is the cutting and joining of two or more photographs into a composite image. This technique is also applied with the use of editing image software (e.g. Photoshop). This photomontage is by landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh, Claude Cormier and Gary Hilderbrand, using a 2007 image by John Stezaker.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is hosting "Composite Landscapes,'' a photomontage exhibit in the Hostetter Gallery. The exhibit comprises 50 images that demonstrate how a group of artists and a dozen of the world's leading landscape architects depict the "conceptual, experiential, and temporal dimensions of landscape."

Montage essentially dates back to the cave painting days, while photomontage has been practiced since the origins of photography. Postcard photomontage was popular in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The Berlin Dada group created press photomontages to express their nontraditional artistic visions. Max Ernst (1891–1976) used photomontages of military technology and equipment to express the horror of the new killing machines of World War I.

The Hostetter Gallery exhibit has a mix of drawings, photomontages, acrylics and pastels, a video and hybrid works used by the landscape architects and artists. And while the show includes a collaged watercolor from 1790 and photomontages from Isabella Gardner's Asian travels in the 1880s, it mostly involves selected images taken within the last 20 years and adding another dimension, reality or vision to the original photo. Ken Smith of WORKSHOP: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, NYC, for instance, imagines grand chandeliers hovering above Fifth Avenue; Michael Van Valkenburgh incorporates a fish farm adjacent to the Tuileries Garden in Paris.

The exhibit is curated by Charles Waldheim, Ruettgers consulting curator of landscape, with assistant curator Andrea Hansen. Waldheim explained the intent of the exhibit is to attract a new audience to the museum by examining the history, methodology and aesthetics of using montages in new ways. He notes that many of the images were not intended to be works of art, but created to promote potential landscape projects.