Situating the artist’s innermost musings alongside his animal topics, Landers oscillates between humor and vulnerability, revealing the uncomfortable truths which underpin each the act of artmaking and the human situation.
Right here Landers fuses longstanding motifs in his work, which originated as discrete collection: his depictions of aspen tree carvings, and his North American animal portraits. These modalities have been a cornerstone of Landers’ follow since he was a graduate pupil within the Yale College MFA program, creating early sculptures of animals which might change into his major topics, in a studio house which he blanketed with dense, automated writings throughout its partitions. Landers has since prolonged these inscriptions, which embrace confessional content material, speculative conjectures, and cheeky refrains, to his aspen tree work.
Utilizing the folks custom of the arborglyph, Landers’ representations of tree carvings function each a meditative train and a monument to life itself—a file of existence and output. Landers was initially impressed by Nineteenth-century aspen etchings left by Basque shepherds, who lived as nomads throughout the Western United States. As an antidote to lonely solo journey, the shepherds would etch their names, poetry, drawings, and extra into the bark, usually utilizing instruments like knives, and in some instances, their fingernails.
Whereas aspens solely stay to be a few century previous, in lots of instances, these carvings have outlived the timber themselves, and stay on fallen, lifeless timber. Additional, the aspens lend an prolonged metaphor to the interconnectedness of the artist’s follow itself: very similar to the interwoven root programs of those timber, Landers’ multimedia oeuvre continues to morph and cross-pollinate alongside conceptual lattices.
When layered alongside his wildlife portraits, his creatures inhabit an existential consciousness, gazing again by way of the viewer with an arresting aura. The eyes of Landers’ animals bear an virtually human high quality, acquainted but cryptic, staging an engrossing encounter with their quiet impact. On this manner, Landers’ private prose inherits bigger contexts of mortality, similar to ecological catastrophe and shifting political realities. His depicted animals are animated alongside bubbles of thought, each playful and foreboding in nature. On this manner, Landers conjures reflections on the impermanence of human life and the items we go away behind.
at Petzel, New York
till Might 23, 2025
