Placed & Displaced

Placed and Displaced
Amanda Maciuba

My work is concerned with how the effects of purposeful human actions, alongside uncontrollable factors of time and nature, alter both the current landscape and human agency within that landscape. The accrual of our past modifications in combination with what evolves over those remnants leaves us with physical traces of past lives. It provides a history of the land and our interactions within and upon it that can be read and evaluated through careful observation. My recent work is specifically concerned with the landscapes, communities, development practices and environmental concerns prevalent throughout the Midwest and New England. By reacting directly to the landscapes and environments I am currently living in, my work examines and critiques place.

In my work, I begin with the landscapes most familiar to me, where I am now, and then expand my practice to include a broader understanding of changes brought onto our surroundings by human hands. I use my personal experiences with disorientation and dislocation in the various suburban, urban and rural landscapes I encounter in my everyday life and share them with a wider audience. I question the sustainability of our current decisions and actions within the cycles of development and destruction upon the landscape.I call attention to the unique and irrational characteristics of locations, both beauty and absurdity in the landscapes of our everyday. By combining my labor-intensive print media and drawing practices with familiar landscapes drawn in an exaggerated form, my work reconsiders how the physical manifestation of our surroundings have come to reflect our disregard towards them and begin to consider an alternative way forward.

Exhibition Run: September 9 – October 24, 2019

Image: Fix Something Else Nearby Instead II, Intaglio, 2017