Mark Kasumovic’s series, Ideal Landscapes, offers acritique of traditional landscape photography’s overt aestheticization of the natural world. Embracing mankind’s impulse to improve upon the inherent beauty of nature, his work suggests another strategy for refinement. It is through the electronic lighting of the landscape that Kasumovic repositions nature as a perfectly realized product ripe for human consumption.



Amanda Arcuri’s work, Present in Absence, also aims to embellish the landscape. Her time-elapsed invasions of public parks highlight humanized elements of nature via streaks of fire and strategically laid lights. However, in the speed of her performance, Arcuri’s photographs all but

eliminate the hand of the human who created them.



“Independently, these two artists illustrate alternate strategies for picturing landscape at a crossroads,” explains curator Sarah Munro, “in the wake of a perilously industrialized era where man and nature invariably meet.”