Landscapes of Fear

Andre Yvon, Andy Kincaid, Brandi Twilley, Bruno Smith, Bryce Kroll, Cait Porter, Carlos Rigau, Chang Sujung, Charlotte vander Borght, Daniel Boccato, David Bordett, Greg Carideo, Jason Murphy, Jeff Williams, Jen Mazza, Lino Bernabe, Lucia Love, Marie Lorenz, Nate Heiges, Nick Irzyk, Nicholas Sullivan, Olivia Drusin, Patrick Carlin Mohundro, Philip Hinge, Pooneh Maghazehe, Quincy Langford, Rudolf Samohejl, Seung-Min Lee, Shaina Tabak, Shaun Krupa, Tuguldur Yondonjamts

5.2.2025 - 6.22.2025

Nate Heiges, Benson & Hedges, 28” x 38.5”, 2018.

International Waters presents Landscapes of Fear, a group exhibition exploring how fear materializes within our environments, shaping the spaces we inhabit and influencing our interactions with them.

In 1884 at the London Institute, John Ruskin delivered two lectures which would later be titled The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, offering a critique of the atmospheric and moral decline of England, as perceived through his detailed observations of the sky. In his art criticism and philosophy, Ruskin defined the artist as an instrument of perception, attuned to the structures and meanings of the surrounding environment — and vulnerable to the environment’s corruption. In his observations of the sky, what Ruskin confronted was not a mere shift in weather, but rather the collapse of a coherent natural order under the conditions of industrialization. As new forms of labor severed human experience from the environment, the surrounding landscape, once embodying purity and the sublime, degraded into a formless and polluted field. As the environment deteriorated, so too did the artist's faculty of representation, mirroring a broader erosion of aesthetic sensibility and the social frameworks of daily life.

For Ruskin, the collapse of the natural world stripped the artist of perceptual agency, immersing them in an environment where the boundary between nature and artifice had dissolved. As the landscape's coherence unraveled, it transformed into a terrain marked by psychic disruption and material change. This disintegration of natural order revealed how fear organizes space, imposing fragmentation and instability onto the very ground of experience. That dynamic has only deepened with time, expanding into the digital, political, and ecological systems of the present — environments saturated not with soot but with surveillance, displacement, and accelerating collapse.

In the text that lends its title to this exhibition, Yi-Fu Tuan describes how fear extends outward into space, conditioning pathways and territories that frame how bodies inhabit the world. While Ruskin’s storm-cloud was a symptom of material and moral degeneration, the contemporary storm-cloud is diffuse, embedded within the infrastructures that mediate perception itself. Within this unsettled field, the artist is again positioned as both instrument and respondent, grappling with landscapes that are no longer stable grounds for meaning.

Responding to this precarious and shifting reality, the artists in Landscapes of Fear explore various modes of representing the underlying instability that characterizes our contemporary environments:

     Chang Sujung’s plein air painting of Central Park, Mobile Observer 22, is rendered within the self-enclosed space of a shirt cuff. This imposition of the panorama, contained by the formal attire of labor, suggests a landscape mediated by societal roles—a world internalized and perhaps constrained by the very structures of the observing subject.
     In the painting Portent 2, Jen Mazza revisits a fragment of Titian’s 12-block woodcut The Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea (1514-15). A moment frozen after the cataclysmic event, the painting operates as a diagram of affect, isolating the linework from the original print to express the spatial and emotional disorder of the landscape following the destructive collapse of the sea over the Egyptian army.
     In Lost Body, Shaun Krupa presses his body into slumping mud, creating a sculptural cavity of his shape within a geometric slab. Recalling Mesoamerican burial chambers, Krupa examines the process of the body returning to the earth. His imprint functions as both absence and presence, emphasizing where the boundary between self and environment dissolves.
     In a pair of paintings, Brandi Twilley confronts the memory of her family's house fire, representing the destructive force and the subsequent aftermath. This visceral depiction highlights how fear can become deeply embedded within the spatial memory of a place, particularly when the very structures of dwelling and material stability are violently erased.
     Bryce Kroll’s False Echo centers on a commonplace tool used to shape the natural environment — a used ECHO SRM-266 weed wacker which he found at auction from the NYC Department of Corrections. Kroll likens the process of landscaping to an aesthetic pursuit -- through a series of reproductions and manipulations to the weed wacker’s form, the object becomes a multifaceted symbol: a tool used to “civilize the chaos” of nature, an artifact with provenance linked to institutional labor, and an instrument whose re-formed existence reveals the landscape through the lens of its own manipulation.

In this exhibition, the artistic examinations of the surrounding landscape unfold within a contemporary context increasingly defined by pervasive and unseen systems of influence shaping our interactions and understanding of space. Surveillance capitalism, with constant monitoring, algorithmic sorting, and the conditioning of behavior, defines a distributed landscape of fear, a terrain now characterized by the deceptive reach of data extraction and predictive control, rather than solely by material degradation. Within this climate, a palpable anxiety permeates the social fabric, a sense of vulnerability and encroaching authoritarianism that colors our experience of even the most mundane spaces, leaving individuals to navigate a terrain where the grounds of autonomy and trust feel increasingly fragile.