LYDIA DILDILIAN
PORTFOLIO         INFO & M[OR]E





LANDSCAPE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
The word ‘landscape’ bombards our imaginations with a plume of mental images more specific than we may think. Seeded within these imagined lands are the sublime paintings of the Hudson River School, and the arresting photographs documenting western territories gathered by the Farm Security Administration. Both present a vision of the American Dream threaded through Manifest Destiny, whether that be the idealization of land and the abundance of space presented by Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, or staged photographs vying for rural rehabilitation of the western United States from Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. These works of art made in the 19th and 20th centuries transport values and norms of a different time, ultimately recycling images and ideas into landscape archetypes belonging to the Western canon. Today these themes are ubiquitous but removed from the source, as evidenced by scrolling through stock imagery of ‘land’ and finding generic non-places filled with oceans, forests, mountains, and deserts. When further compared to contemporary representations of landscape in pop culture media like video games, films, fine art, and advertisements, the viewer is treated with a very different set of ideals about land, its use, and what it means to live in America in the 21st century.

This body of work explores the complicated relationships between land and American identity by recontextualizing, examining, and investigating the idea of the American Dream with contemporary visual representations of land or landscape imagery. Leading into a Venn diagram circling the history of American landscape imagery and contemporary social issues like critical issues surrounding climate change, land rights, and its uses. These new viewpoints present critical insights into viewing Western land, its transformations, and the dissolution of the American Dream. Through my series of two and three-dimensional mixed media paintings, I explore these themes and research with a newly imagined American landscape that is fractured, incomplete, and reworked. The content pulls visual references from photographs of the landscape and screenshots from the Fallout franchise video games. I use an acrylic skin transfer method to attach photographs or digital collages to a substrate, I rework the image by painting over the transfer image making an entirely new work. The works are neither paintings, photographs, or collages, but an amalgamation of all three.

---

Artist Notes & Sources: This series of work started in 2021 and is still on going.
Artwork Photographed by Paden DeVita





Copy Right 2024 Lydia Dildilian