Dana Fritz
Views Removed (2014-16)
Dana Fritz constructs the photographs in Views Removed from multiple negatives, creating fictional landscapes that exist only on paper. Overexposed white backgrounds isolate the land elements of her elegantly simplified compositions. These subjects range from miniature bonsai trees and suiseki rock arrangements to pine and maple trees from her backyard in Nebraska or a garden in Japan. Like Japanese ink paintings, from which Fritz drew further inspiration, these photographs represent an ideal and thus imaginary, landscape. In contrast to most Western landscape paintings and photographs, which show explorations and surveys that assert ownership and control over the environment, Views Removed uses artistic manipulation to achieve what she calls a “conversation between living entities.” Her landscapes allow both sides of that conversation, her human artistry and her natural subject, to stand, but also invite the difference to become blurred, if not erased altogether.
Terraria Gigantica (2007-11)
Dana Fritz, Professor of Art at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, photographs biodomes. These are manmade indoor ecosystems that replicate the Earth’s environments, sometimes for the purposes of research or space colonization, sometimes as educational tourist attractions. These elaborate and carefully controlled fictions are what she calls “possible impossibilities.” Her photographs disclose the painted illusions and engineered infrastructures that comprise such environments. When she photographs the green moss growing down the surface of a painted landscape, as seen here, she allows the layers of nature and culture to oscillate back and forth between seeming natural and seeming artificial. In doing so, she demonstrates the entanglement of nature and culture within these, and perhaps, all environments. She admits, “My opinion about the human-nature relationship has evolved significantly because of this project. At first I saw [these terms] as more oppositional but now believe it is too late for the idea of defining nature by our absence.”
