Alice Dubiel:
The Landscape Tale

The Landscape Tale

Much of my work over the past forty-five years has involved the theme, Land Use: An Alchemical Treatise to explore connections between our belief systems about society and how we treat the planet. I am interested in conflicts which arise from our expectations about land use, shaped by idealized images and our interest in land exploitation. Athough I work primarily in painting and printmaking, installations offer time and space to contemplate these factors in our present peril of environmental instability. For me, the Western landscape tradition is still especially powerful in its ability to distance the viewer from the outdoors and other people and in its relentless desire for control.

The Landscape Tale examines the ways traditional cultural approaches– landscape painting and the concept of Arcadia–have contributed to contemporary land use practices, how historic urban environments inform our desires. In works such as Views and Reviews, I like to explore the conflicts which arise from our contemporary expectations about land use, expectations shaped by idealized art and design images and our vernacular urban setting. Using the quotation essay, I want to think about different forms of resistance and resilience as strategies, sometimes alternating, to foster our lives and activities.

Approaching the millenium, the urgency of developing visual languages for confronting climate change and caring for vulnerable communities sparked my inquiries into topography and biocenology. In environmental installations and works at Carkeek Park, I explored shrine technologies where the relationships between sacred qualities of place can incorporate artistic and ethical values. Shrines may be local or draw visitors from far and near. I like to think of some contemporary tourist destinations as shrines, offering visitors a share in their meaning: Mt. Rainier, the US Capitol, Graceland, the Oregon Trail, the Grand Canyon, and refer to this quality in Views and Reviews.

In recent years, residencies at North Cascades National Park and art adventures in Gwangju, Daegu and Jeju, Korea impressed me with the temporal natures of maps and constructions. Some traditional flooding management technologies, refined over hundreds of years, demonstrate the possibilities of providing urban comfort of tens of thousands of people in emergencies.

Topographic maps appeal to me because they are created by active scientists through personal contact with terrain. When I am on site, I practice notetaking approaches such as plein air painting, photo documentation, seasonal series. Biocenology characterizes this interface of cultural and natural systems; as the study of communities and member interactions in nature, it is part of the science of ecology. I am interested in the complexity of overlapping multiplicity and the tendency of natural processes to pursue cycles of life.