The Earth: Amanda Musick
Big Bend National Park, Texas I © Amanda Musick
Written by Maggie Boccella
How much of reality can a photograph truly be said to represent? How much is that concrete image of a transient instant, of the world as it exists in the span of a single shutter click, reflective of how the world truly is? Is there any real way for photographers to capture that “truth” in a constantly changing universe? Where do the limits of a static medium lie?
Amanda Musick seeks to explore these questions in her ongoing series Land Unfolding. Constructed from photographs taken in vast outdoor landscapes, Musick creates collages of the natural world, cutting and arranging geological elements on top of one another until the original landscape is unrecognizable and a new, perfectly whole one stands in its place. “Illusive vistas” are formed from her work, landscapes just beyond the realm of our spatial understanding that offer a glimpse into the state of the earth around us.
Mid-Fork Holston River, Mendota, Virginia I © Amanda Musick
Musick’s pieces are a skewed Inception-esque portrayal of the natural world, its components picked out and replaced, moved around in a kaleidoscope of color and form. Her collage work does not gather elements, but rather rearranges them, forcing our hand at reimagining what desert rocks and pine trees and large, winding rivers truly represent.
Are we seeing a real place? The elements are all real, drawn from Musick’s own photography, but are we instead seeing a figment? A creation, meant to highlight something adjacent to the simplicity of the natural world? It becomes difficult to distinguish reality from fiction the longer one looks at the works. Has Musick created her own world, or simply changed how we look at the one we live in?
Maroon Bells, Colorado I © Amanda Musick
Every piece of Musick’s original photographs used in the series are incorporated into Land Unfolding. According to the artist, the “floating landscape forms” — or the circular collage images in the series, set against a white background — are “made from the deconstructed remains of the collages” in the rest of the series. These formless shapes, like refuse piles, collect the bits that otherwise wouldn’t be used.
This process of deconstruction and rebuilding is the crux of Musick’s message. We as humans are hardly aware of our changing landscape even as we continue to build on top of it — new cities, new superhighways, new gas stations in the middle of nowhere. We knock down trees, construct dams, run nature right out of its home for our own gain. We are blind to the consequences of invading upon nature, consequences that we may not be able to recover from in the near future.
Arches National Park, Utah II © Amanda Musick
Land Unfolding pieces Mother Nature back together like a child with Scotch tape and glitter glue — the intention remains, but the original vision is forever lost, invisible under the skin of Musick’s new creations. Her work echoes humanity’s attempts to preserve the environment, however well-intentioned. While we can make attempts at reparations, we are still left with a “void”, as Musick describes it. Our reality is forever skewed, with no way back and a foggy, uncertain way forward.
Land Unfolding is available to view on Musick’s website.
Laurel Fork Falls, Jocassee Gorges, South Carolina I © Amanda Musick
