MAY 2022
NORTH GALLERY
The Site of Landscape | Rachel Mulvihill
Rachel Mulvihill (she/her) is a landscape painter of Unangan heritage born in Fairbanks, Alaska. As an artist who represents place, her interest and approach is formed by her upbringing in Fairbanks the homeland and traditional territories of the lower Tanana Dene Peoples where she continues to live and work.
Artist Statement
These paintings are not about trees. These paintings are about sight. They are about seeing and what we see when we look at landscape. They are also about where we stand when we look at landscape—the site. How is a landscape framed? How is nature framed by landscape? These trees are out of place: rooted in Fairbanks and here today in Anchorage, on the land of the Eklutna Dena’ina people. Are these “Alaskan” landscapes? My motivations as a painter stem from the complexities of this landscape.
Landscape has/is a history of naturalizing erasures, revisions, and constructed perspectives. Not only does landscape orient and produce it’s viewer but it also can transform the land itself. When I think about landscape I think about stepping back—a perspective of distance and framing from outside a space. Hito Steyerl has suggested that this metaphor could now been more accurately described as a falling backwards. Steyerl describes a “deteritorialized freedom” as a product of vertical perspective. The boundaries that describe spaces disappear as our perspective becomes untethered from a stable horizon and ground. Does untethered perspective do more to reveal or obscure the entanglements that complicate the landscape?
What can the positioning of landscape reveal about its relationship to place? I thought I was painting a referendum of the vertical perspective but I wonder if these paintings are an example of it (or an example of how difficult it can be to be grounded). They are untethered landscapes. Their site is both specific—to Fairbanks, to my experience—but also moving and transforming. Is landscape what I observe, is it the photograph that I take into my painting studio, or is it here, framed by this gallery space?
If being grounded is not always comfortable then it might be easier to experience place at a distance or through a frame. Being grounded is a metaphor for a state of mind as well as a lived experience of place. Being grounded can also be a way of understanding, acknowledging, and caring for the place where I am. There are myriad literal and imaginative ways to be elsewhere. For many people, including myself, being or becoming grounded may be/will be uncomfortable. In these paintings I wanted to look behind the metaphor of a groundless position.
