My initial reaction to [Lisa M. Robinson]‘s series of pictures in the snow was one of ambivalence. Perhaps it is of little surprise that the image that seized my attention was one of orange construction netting — construction imagery gets me every time. As [New England winter] has dumped the white stuff upon us these past few weeks (and months), I can’t help recalling Robinson’s work on a near daily basis.

It is significant, I think, that photographing the snow is one of the great Photo 101 challenges — light metering the gleaming landscape in a manner as to render it accurately, and not in muddied grays, is a dull (but useful) common assignment. It is truly a challenge to both photograph in the uncomfortable cold while adjusting for the dominant, detail-less white. But I guess this is what left me ambivalent for so long; the series can be viewed simply as an excercise, as cool, empty, and impersonal studies or camera tests.

The blank heaps of passionless snow may serve as a barrier, a homogenizer, but alternatively, they can be viewed as outlines — a fat highlighter moving along the landscape. Snow, in photographic reproduction as well as in life, becomes the great natural decontextualizer, painting out the background, making the sky and foreground uniform and flat. The world is limited to dark and occasionally colored shapes and the peculiar subtleties of that which the snow cannot bury completely — structures, living things, black simmering water on the pond — brought into crisp focus and thoughtful scrutiny.

[The New Yorker] wrote a while back on Robinson’s work: “For the past five winters, Robinson photographed landscapes from Colorado to New York so enveloped in snow that they appear almost blank. Her pictures zero in on what remains when the world turns white: a lakeside picnic table in its own snug furrow; a plot, outlined by black poles and yellow rope, crisscrossed by the tracks of solitary travellers. The patched-together wooden shack of an ice fisherman is fragile and forlorn in one image, but, seen from a distance alongside a scattering of similar shelters, it becomes part of a colorful toy village of Monopoly houses seen through a scrim of falling snow.“

Jon Feinstein describes his series Small Signs as as “a visual interpretation of the ominous intersections between man-made objects and our natural landscape.” It’s remarkable how much this very basic theme comes up in such different sorts of work throughout art history; it is such a basic concept and cliché. Nevertheless, it has been millennia since civilization has built itself up within the cycle of light and shadow and growth and rot. These conflicts are as relevant and contemporary as they are well worn.

I generally feel rather challenged by the artistic notion of the “landscape” — off the top of my head it seems so dull, the stuff of over-the-mantle, mountain-forest-and-trickling-stream painting. That which is described as “landscape” suggests to me a cookie-cutter and benign collection of hills and trees and rocks. There’s no sense of time, tragedy, or entropic anxiety in this; there’s no sense of the regrettable beaten path, no conflict.

Thinking upon past art history classes, the piece of “traditional” landscape that always stuck with me was The Ox-bow by Thomas Cole. I loved how much weirder it seemed than the typical river running through the woods, and particularly loved the term for this anomalous geological formation.

Upon closer look, it turns out that this classic piece, while singing Manifest Destiny in my head, is also in the business of describing and commenting upon the conflict of civilization and the natural landscape. The folks at Wikipedia write: “In returning to painting landscapes, Cole was faced with the dichotomy of the untamed wilderness and land cultivated by man. While other painters of the Hudson River School would merge the two peacefully, Cole did not shy away from portraying the two as opposites and showing how the cultivation would destroy the natural wilderness, and as a result never meet in the painting.”

What follows are several of Feinstein’s Small Signs, sequenced amongst the five-part series Thomas Cole was arduously in the midst of creating when he took a break to paint The Ox-bow. Cole’s series The Course of Empire is a fairly over-the-top and moralizing allegory of mankind’s insatiability and nature’s inevitable restoration of balance when balance goes off-kilter. Feinstein’s work is so subtle in contrast, and certainly not laid out in such a narrative arc; yet, in these works I find thought-provoking formal and thematic parallels.

I think back and remember that this nature vs. man-made dichotomy has made its way through my own artistic concerns, then disappeared, and recurred again, like Cole’s mossy, mountaintop plant-growth. I’m not entirely sure where this is all going.