Judith Belzer

Judith Belzer

My new work explores the complex relationships between nature and culture through the lens of the landscapes we have created. The current series investigates the edge lands where the built environment and the natural landscape converge, clash and interlace. The engagements that occur along such boundaries are dynamic, unpredictable and sometimes chaotic. Using a broad painting language of mark-making and a kind of bent, vertiginous perspective (often from an overhead angle) the paintings evoke a visceral sense of what it feels like to live in a landscape transformed by our own industriousness.

While our culture generally likes to segregate the natural and the built landscape into discreet categories of experience -- the sublimity of nature over here, the creations of civilization over there—the paintings map out how we have in fact jammed our manufactured landscape right up into the natural one and in the process they capture the kinetic energy and agitated motion many of us experience in our 21st century lives. Elements of order, beauty and exhilaration can be found in this world but there is also tension and disorder when these landscapes meet up, as well as a terrific energy in the friction the encounter produces.


Artist website