Rewilding
June 26 – July 31, 2021
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce Rewilding, a group exhibition presenting works by over 30 artists with varied approaches to landscape painting, photography, and sculpture. The show will be on view in Los Angeles from June 26 – July 31, 2021.
“Rewilding” is a term which, in conservation science and policy, refers to a radical effort to restore self-willed ecosystems and protect wilderness areas from the ecological destruction caused by industrialization and globalization. Colloquially, it refers to a recuperative individual or communal return to nature. The drive to rewild is therefore both survivalist and nostalgic. This exhibition investigates the evocative mixture of necessity and longing contained in the expression, only more pertinent as we grapple with a world indelibly marked by the pandemic, quarantine, and their effects.
The past two years have revived a Romantic articulation of the wilderness as a refuge from the stress of day-to-day existence, where greener pastures provide a quiet reprieve, and our natural instincts emerge to quell our urban anxieties. While discussions surrounding an abstract “return to normalcy” now abound, we also have the opportunity to formulate new ways of being within and caring for the natural world. The works in this show reflect upon what a process of rewilding ourselves might look and feel like.
Rewilding reassesses the traditionally undervalued status of landscape painting, instead offering images that at times testify to the fraught status of the natural in our contemporary world, and at other times serve as simple reminders of the peace that can be achieved when a distance from public life and social power structures is created. As the United States nears the end of the long era of quarantine, this liminal moment offers us a chance to reevaluate our individual, social, and planetary attachments to that which is wild, alive, and balanced.
The artists on view are Arno Beck, James Chronister, Michael Cline, Andrew Dadson, Andrea Joyce Heimer, Sophie von Hellermann, Sophia Heymans, Margarete Jakschik, Pieter Jennes, Kate Klingbeil, Sean Landers, Laurens Legiers, Jake Longstreth, Marin Majic, Nikki Maloof, Tony Matelli, John McAllister, John Millei, JP Munro, Alessandro Pessoli, Salvo, Laura Sanders, Jan-Ole Schiemann, Alexandria Tarver, Robert Terry, Fabian Treiber, Nicola Tyson, Jannis Varelas, Jonathan Wateridge, and Nicole Wittenberg.