Friends of Marin Center Gallery
Heavy Terrain
On view February 6 through March 31, 2020
Heavy Terrain is an exhibition of work by Tania Houtzager that explores our fragmented, fraught relationship to natural landscapes. What is your emotional attachment to a melting glacier? How do you remember a landscape that no longer exists?
The work in Heavy Terrain acts as an archive of intangible remembrances that carry the weight of shifting landscapes and the passage of time and connects to Houtzager’s broader concern with the relationship between physical and psychological spaces.
Through material gestures, image transfers and manipulated surfaces, Houtzager deconstructs landscapes in an attempt to portray how the dazzling vastness of nature might exist in our imaginations yet be fractured in reality.
At the core of this work is a concern for nature’s fundamental value in a society that has been constructed and highly controlled. We inhabit built environments that are not only metaphorically different from the naturally occurring world, but that obliterate it through deforestation, pollution and inaction on climate change. Like visions from a half-remembered dream, the scenes in Heavy Terrain are at once familiar, yet alien; beautiful, but haunting.
This exhibit is on display in the Friends of Marin Center Gallery, in the Marin Center Exhibit Hall building. The Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 9am - 5pm and select weekends, when the room is not reserved for an event. Closed Holidays. Please email lgarrison@marincounty.org to ensure availability.