Morrow Pettigrew
"Landscape", 2007
Thesis Project
"Silk Work I" and "Regular Mountains, Santa Monica" are sculptural installations which focus on the digital modification and mediation of the natural world. Suites of landscape photographs are digitally reworked into pixelated renderings, proposing a new digital picturesque. This gridded visual re-organization of the landscape explores the hybrid terrain of technological naturalism, and recalls the fragmentation and compartmentalization of the contemporary landscape that is experienced as a series of discrete points rather than a continuous whole. This abstracted digital representation of the land is then recreated in silk fabric and animated by a mechanized armature, re-endowing the image with a tangible form and a viscerally felt presence in space.