Fringe Landscapes: Searching for a Better Grassland
Summer Ventis
Fringe Landscapes: Searching for a Better Grassland
Display Dimensions Variable. Each Tent Form 40”h / Monotype from Woodblock, Support Structure / 2017
A Belly Full of Water Against the Future Drought: Sp[in]ed
Summer Ventis
A Belly Full of Water Against the Future Drought: Sp[in]ed
8.25 x 10.5 / Xylene Toner Transfer, Ink / 2018
I looked up at the sky and saw what I had put into the ground: pool/loop
Summer Ventis
I looked up at the sky and saw what I had put into the ground: pool/loop
Display Dimensions Variable / Projected Video Loop, Mirror / 2017
ceding clouds V
Summer Ventis
ceding clouds V
14" x 22.25” / Monotype from Woodblock /2017
Wilderness Reflections
Summer Ventis
Wilderness Reflections
Display Dimensions Variable / Site-Specific Installation at Mt. St. Helens. Reflective Mylar, Found Objects / 2018
Untitled
Summer Ventis
Untitled
8 x 10” / Pine Sap on Rives BFK Flocked with Ash from Mt. St. Helens / 2018
A Belly Full of Water Against the Future Drought III
Summer Ventis
A Belly Full of Water Against the Future Drought III
Each Piece 8 x 10” / Distributable Toner Prints / 2018
Emigrant Lake[s]/Lost Lake[s]
Summer Ventis
Emigrant Lake[s]/Lost Lake[s]
Printed Surface 12.5 x 362”. Display Dimensions Variable / Monotype from Woodblock, Found Stones / 2016
Defensible Space Diptych
Summer Ventis
Defensible Space Diptych
Each Piece 10.5 x 8.25” / Polyester Plate Lithography, Embossment / 2017
Emigrant Lake[s] XIX
Summer Ventis
Emigrant Lake[s] XIX
22” x 30” / Monotype from Woodblock / 2015
Artist Website

“Outside and inside are both intimate — they are always ready to be reversed … If there exists a border-line surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides” -Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics of Space”


Our lives consist of internal and external landscapes. My work examines the ways in which these landscapes intersect and are altered by such intersections. Paper becomes the “border-line surface,” the membrane that divides and connects what is inside us and what is outside.

Landscape consists not only of the physical realities of our surroundings, but of our relationship to those realities. J. Douglas Porteous calls landscape “a visual construct [that] does not exist without an observer.” In observing, we project ourselves onto and into the landscape. Individual landscapes, however, also dictate how we observe them. The landscape is inside us as much as we are inside it.

My prints act as representations and embodiments of this interplay of outer and inner space. In many images, I represent relationships and the spaces that contain and create them abstractly, in hopes that viewers will use the space of the landscape as a site for meditation on the relationships and spaces in their own lives. Often, ink transfers from the block to the paper, but the residue of previous impressions also transfers from the paper back to the block and then onto subsequent prints. Through this exchange, the surface documents a conversation, the way we are changed by contact with new environments and ideas. In installation or book form, this surface expands to form its own environment.

My recent work engages the reciprocal relationship between inner and outer space, between people and our environments, in the landscapes of the Western and Midwestern United States. ceding clouds, Controlled Burn and Fire Maps explore this relationship through the lens of fire — the imprints left by wildfire, on the part of the landscape, and prescribed burns, on the part of people. Emigrant Lake[s] addresses drought’s effects on the Western landscape and its population. Lagoons and Fringe Landscapes emerge from the beauties and horrors of modern agriculture. Lagoonsreferences the lurid colors of the waste containment tanks used by industrial hog farms.Fringe Landscapes arises from the notion of a corn field as a grassland that contains our longing for the now-gone prairie grasslands. defensible space and a belly full of water against the future drought use cactus imagery to interrogate issues surrounding borders and scarcity.

Across these bodies of work, the tent form is emblematic of the tenuous nature of our relationship to our surroundings, an object that allows us to connect with the landscape, to spend time in it, by separating and protecting us from it.

Summer Ventis

Warning, Watch, Advisory – Summer Ventis

April 5th - April 29th, 2024

Alternative Greetings – Summer Ventis

June 3rd - June 26th, 2022

Summer Ventis – Held Breaths

October 2nd - October 31st, 2021

Containment – Summer Ventis

November 1st – November 24th, 2019