is it not enough that I smile in the valleys?
CURATED BY COREY OBERLANDER, LINDSEY STAPLETON, JAMIE STEELE
May 7 - June 18, 2022
Whitespace + Take it Easy
“Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the plains. She seems to say sternly, why came ye here before your time? This ground is not prepared for you. Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother?" - Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau’s Maine Woods is written from the perspective of a sort of Mother Nature as she watches some idiot sojourner try to conquer her mountain. She wonders why he's pushing so hard - and what he expects to find.
The romantic desire to return to nature presupposes that dreamlike and fulfilling experiences await us if we wander long and hard enough into the wild. However, a realistic reconveyance with nature is not about getting back to the sublime vistas painted in the 1800's - and we get into trouble when exclusively visioning nature as an experience of wonder that exists only in the remote, vast, untouched corners of the world.
Remnants of frontier tradition have resulted in a fetishization of big swaths of untainted land as truly valuable in its otherness and purity. But, in reality, how is a backyard tree less other or worthy than the trees that have never known man? By continuing to place worth on “the Big Outside”, and strengthen our disconnect from our immediate natural surroundings, we risk losing touch with actual nature altogether.
Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? considers the disparity between a collective expectation of nature-as-experience and the reality of what’s actually there. The twelve participating artists present work that both directly and indirectly reacts to the trouble with the idea of wilderness, today - whether by illustrating the ways in which we irrevocably altered our big natural world, opportunities to honor or exist within real nature, or just how farcical attempts at reconveyance with the myth of true wilderness have been throughout history.
Curated by Corey Oberlander, Jamie Steele and Lindsey Stapleton while spanning both Take it Easy and Whitespace in Atlanta Georgia, Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys includes Amy Brener, Zipporah Camille, Hannah Chalew, Belleau + Churchill, Stephanie Dowda DeMer, Sandra Erbacher, Michi Meko, Maria Molteni, David Onri Anderson, Vesna Pavlović, Constance Thalken, and Wretched Flowers.
Excerpt from “Blast Off” by Belleau + Churchill, a solo component of 47 Rockets now on exhibition at Take it Easy in Atlanta, GA.
