If there is one thing which most Bowdoin students can agree on, it's the significance of the landscape that surrounds them.
The Polar Bears of Brunswick, Maine, are not haunted by melting ice caps, but rather spoiled by the natural majesty of Penobscot, Popham, and the Bowdoin Pines. Professor Mullen's new exhibit in the Becker Gallery capitalizes on this appreciation. Titled "Passages," it features powerful depictions of emotive landscapes from across the globe.
Some of these pieces speak directly to the Maine enthusiast. Hudson River School artist William Stanley Haseltine's oil painting, "Coast of New England," depicts a jagged cliff along the water's edge ? an image indeed reminiscent of Popham's shores. "The Mountain Pool," an oil work by landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, shows the classic water hole tucked away into rocky corners of Acadia and Sugarloaf.
Together, these two iconic representations of New England visually complement one of Mullen's explanatory plaques accompanying them: "With its geological wonders, the New World could be interpreted as a modern 'Garden of Eden' that eclipsed the waning civilizations and man-made monuments of Europe."
But the contents of the "Passages" exhibit are far from limited to illustrations of New England and the New World.
Eighteenth-century English artist John Ruskin's "Bellinzona" and an untitled, anonymous Chinese dam wood piece adorn the same wall as "Coast of New England." In the former, Ruskin uses watercolor and goblache over graphite to share the scene of a rustic river valley town through a break in the overlooking cliffs. The Chinese wood art is engraved with a scene in which the nature is actually background to a more industrial dam.
A second of Mullen's plaques on this same wall reads, "The natural world functions more as a verb than a noun...its unique combination of elements, and their disposition, changes from minute to minute, so that it never truly possesses a single static identity."
Like the Chinese wood artwork, other pieces in the exhibit draw from both natural and man-made sources. Pop artist Edward Ruscha's arresting "Double Standard," a graphic silkscreen of a 1969 Standard Oil station, becomes an "operational lighthouse assisting in the navigation of the great interior seas of the United States landscape," according to Mullen.
In "Running Fence," environmental installation artist Christo uses graphite, pastel, charcoal, and a fabric collage to follow the landscaping of a definitively man-made fence.
"From a reconsideration of our preconceptions about the landscape, to the desire to understand our own sense of place in the world, landscape can plumb our understanding of our surroundings, as well as our impact upon it," Mullen noted. The landscapes in "Passages," like those of Ruscha and Christo, explore not only nature but also man's cultivation of the natural world.
In keeping with these exploratory angles from natural to man-made and from national to international, "Passages" also includes more technological approaches to landscape. One of these, "Aerial Soil Conservation Photographs" consists of gelatin silver prints from 1943 that together look like a black and white version of Google Earth.
The overall exhibit aligns with Mullen's Visual Art Landscape Painting class.
"It focuses on the generation of a visual language for landscape and the environment through the medium of painting and drawing," Mullen said.
"Passages" will be in the Becker Gallery through October 5.