Dark Paradise

Dark paradise is an exhibition of photography, video, painting and collage – both by prominent and emerging artists – which exemplifies contemporary discourse and storytelling through the canon of landscape imagery. The artists either engage physically with the landscape, or capture in a poetic – and only at first glance dark – traces of the past within fictitious, internal or political vistas and historically charged places.
The exhibition was originally created for Clocktower Gallery in New York City, and developed out of a fascination for tracing the tradition of the sublime landscape in contemporary images, a genre that forcefully developed in painting in the late 18th century with masters such as Caspar David Friedrich, who coupled the sublime with awe and fear of nature, and from a search of finding these same emotions in more intimate, local, and poetic images created by artists working in a variety of media. Many of the works in the exhibition exclude human figures and, regardless of scale, evoke feelings of an undefined presence of the past or of a world still undiscovered. The presence of human representation in the chosen works is mostly of a darker nature, indicating a level of fear and personal or social combat.