Featuring Merrick Adams, Nadia Ayari, Jessica Cannon, Michele Fletcher, Jen Hitchings, Sung Hwa Kim, Jacob Littlejohn, Hélio Luís, linn meyers, Dan Perkins, Gabriel Rico, and Alexandre Wagner.
An ephemeral moment within the scheme of historical artistic movements, Naturalism offered an unbridled vision of one’s surroundings, bereft of moral judgment. Profoundly impacted by technological progress, societal industrialization, and the development of photography, Naturalism instrumentalized realism as a tool to depict reality only as witnessed and observed. Void of aestheticized, classical ideals, this approach rested on an underlying pessimistic, critical view, although when considered today, these depictions of natural landscapes that have since largely disappeared now seem to us idealized in contemporary times.
Today’s world is one in which the environment and the moral are at odds, yet the environment and ethics, inextricably intertwined. Fresh Nature offers newly contextualized and considered pathways into how Naturalism can confront the inescapably real, navigating a terrain whose existence seems ever precarious, but through an approach of possibility—with the potential for beauty and expansion. — Sabrina Tamar