Mark Tribe “Landscape Pictures”

Minus Space

This event has ended.

“To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.” – Walt Whitman

MINUS SPACE presents Mark Tribe: Landscape Pictures, the esteemed NYC-based artist’s first solo exhibition here at the gallery. For the past decade, interdisciplinary artist Mark Tribe has explored the relationship between the natural environment and technology. His new exhibition will present recent photo and video works from two related bodies of work: Plein Air and Deep Green.

Originally commissioned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Plein Air is a group of large-format, aerial photographs of virtual landscapes made with software that uses geospatial data to create a simulation of the planet Earth. The photographs are not created with a traditional lens-based camera, but are rather data images produced by software. Each irregularly-shaped photograph is a composite of several high-resolution screen captures that are convincingly realistic, yet upon closer examination, noticeably artificial.

About his Plein Air series, Tribe states, “Photography, particularly landscape photography, is as much about projection as it is about representation. The camera captures images, but it also projects power: not only the power to see and to imagine, but also the power to picture the land, to investigate the story of its past, and to delineate its future…This series explores idealized virtual worlds: unspoiled, Edenic places that, it seems to me, are symptomatic of a longing for a time before we started to destroy the land.”

Tribe’s recent video work Deep Green, originally commissioned and exhibited by the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon, is the second in a group of three 24-hour archival recordings of wild landscapes. Each recording in the series is captured in real-time with a stationary digital cinema camera and multiple microphones. This ultra-high-definition, 24-hour-long video was recorded in Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, Jackson County, Oregon, on July 20, 2019, and will be presented 24/7 in our public Water Street windows synched with the time of day (for example, at 11am one sees and hears what was recorded at 11am). The video will be accompanied by four production stills.

Tribe states about Deep Green, “Our planet is in the midst of an unprecedented ecological transition. It goes by various names: climate change, mass extinction, the Anthropocene. As an artist who makes landscape pictures, I am struck by the fact that even the most carefully protected wilderness areas will, over the coming decades, be transformed – in some cases beyond recognition. What will our few remaining wild places look and sound like a century from now? It was with this question in mind that I set out to make a series of archival landscape recordings that capture the preciousness and fragile beauty of nature on the brink and, equally important, preserve for future generations a kind of wilderness experience that is itself endangered.”

He summarizes, “In my work, I am interested in the traditions of Western landscape painting and photography, and how they reflect our changing ideas about the natural world. If, for example, we understand the paintings of the Hudson River School and the frontier photographs of Carlton Watkins and his peers as expressions of manifest destiny, what kinds of landscape images might flow from contemporary American environmentalism in an age of climate change and mass extinction, as we come to realize that our grandchildren will inherit a natural world very different from the one we know today?”

Mark Tribe’s (b. 1966 San Francisco, CA; lives New York, NY) paintings, videos, photographs, installations, and performances have been exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Momenta Art (New York, NY), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles, CA), DiverseWorks (Houston, TX), and Queen Victoria Museum (Launceston, Australia).

His work has also been shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, NY), Menil Collection (Houston, TX), SITE Santa Fe (Santa Fe, NM), San Diego Museum of Art (San Diego, CA), Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX), Telfair Museum of Art (Savannah, Georgia), Montclair Museum of Art (Montclair, NJ), DeCordova Museum (Lincoln, MA), Contemporary Museum (Baltimore, MD), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), National Center for Contemporary Arts (Moscow, Russia), MUAC (Mexico City, Mexico), and Museo de Antioquia (Medellín, Colombia).

Tribe has received grants from Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, ArtsLink, Experimental Television Center, and the Puffin Foundation. He is the author of two books: The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (Charta, 2010) and New Media Art (Taschen, 2006), as well as numerous articles.

His work has been reviewed or discussed in Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, Art Papers, the Boston Globe, the Brooklyn Rail, the Daily Beast, Die Welt, El Pais, Flash Art, Frieze, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Times, Modern Painters, Newsweek, The New York Times, Village Voice, and many other publications.

Tribe has served as Chair of the MFA Fine Arts Department at School of Visual Arts in New York City since 2013. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University, Director of Art and Technology at the Columbia University School of the Arts, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and Artist in Residence at Williams College.

In 1996, he founded Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. He earned an MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego (1994) and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University (1990).