On Imaginary Landscapes
Within us lives all the places we have visited, all the hills we have climbed and the waters we have tread. Our entire existence unfolds within the context of a landscape. Strip away every building and every human invention, and all that remains is our naked bodies within a beautiful and harsh landscape: the backdrop of this wondrous and terrible thing we call life.
Within me is an unending stream of vast landscapes, yet unseen. They are collected from real experiences of real places, stored from memory. But memory is an abstraction of reality, for our minds condense and simplify to form a distilled version, an “idea” of what is real. These ideas congeal to form something unreal and ultimately imagined. It is from here where my Imaginary Landscapes begin: at the intersection between landscape painting, memory and inventiveness.
The Imaginary Landscapes are not created from a cohesive image, they are not depictions of a pre-formed vision, copied from my mind to the painting surface. Rather, the process and act of painting allows the landscape to emerge. Arbitrary marks become the groundwork to form meaning; to convey space in a way I understand it to work. Ideas of trees and rivers and mountains, configurations of clouds, cast shadows and upheaved stones start to assemble before me. My job it to interpret and push further into being. What remains is an unreal reality within an ungrounded landscape - completely tangible, yet non-existent.
Born in 1985 (Colorado Springs, CO), Evan Mann earned his BFA from Colorado State University and his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. As a multidisciplinary visual artist, his work is in the collections of the RISD Museum, Holter Museum of Art, and the private collection of Paula and Leonard Granof. Evan is an Emmy® Award winning filmmaker, whose work has earned 4 Vimeo Staff Picks, been highlighted on Short of the Week, and has screened at festivals around the globe. His work has been exhibited at Art Basel, The Wassaic Project, Denver Art Museum, MCA, Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, the Hammer Museum and has been featured in New American Paintings.