Michael Brophy: Landscape as Character

A talk exploring our relationship to the natural world in the Pacific Northwest

I’ve always thought of the environment as enveloping us, and landscape as a character having agency. To me, nature is not some pristine other; it’s not some place where, as the Wilderness Act imagined it, “man is a visitor who does not remain.” The “there” is here. We are a part of the landscape, and we construct our landscapes with our depictions. Some of these depictions are more fraught than others, but all convey the interconnectedness of human, natural, and cultural histories.

—Michael Brophy

Art Credit:
Michael Brophy, Machine in the Garden, 2016, oil on canvas, 78 x 80 inches, courtesy the artist and Russo|Lee Gallery