I have witnessed the utter transformation of what was once primarily a world of small towns and countryside into one of ever expanding networks of expressways, corporate centers and big box distribution centers. My work is informed, directly or indirectly, by these highly disorienting places. What I see are entirely new kinds of landscapes–highly engineered and intensely geometricized.

Steven Baris, “Geometries of Flow D15.” Oil on Mylar, 24 x 24 in. 2013.
© Steven Baris. Courtesy of the artist.

My current paintings and other multimedia projects expand my ongoing investigations of the built environment and spatial experience. I have always been sensitive to my spatial surround. I grew up on various American Indian reservations out West (my father worked for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs) where I lived in relatively unpopulated environments from lush forests to the Great Plains. Moving to the Northeast to attend graduate school, my spatial antennae afforded me a unique perspective on radically different kinds of spaces.

I have witnessed the utter transformation of what was once primarily a world of small towns and countryside into one of ever expanding networks of expressways, corporate centers and big box distribution centers. My work is informed, directly or indirectly, by these highly disorienting places. What I see are entirely new kinds of landscapes–highly engineered and intensely geometricized.

Over time I became fascinated by the increasingly built-up regions that lay beyond the urban centers and their contiguous suburbs (often referred to as exurbia). I have witnessed the utter transformation of what was once primarily a world of small towns and countryside into one of ever expanding networks of expressways, corporate centers and big box distribution centers. My work is informed, directly or indirectly, by these highly disorienting places. What I see are entirely new kinds of landscapes–highly engineered and intensely geometricized.

Not surprisingly, I categorize my paintings as landscapes, although hardly of the picturesque tradition. Rather, I want my paintings to enact similar spatial tensions and paradoxes as the environments I am referencing. At the heart of both lies an amalgam of space and structure, determined largely by seen and unseen geometries. My paintings present a space that is highly elastic and ambiguous where the most rudimentary spatial cues–basic binaries as proximity and distance, container and contained–are purposefully muddled. I strive to achieve in my paintings a precarious balance of spatial coherence and incoherence by deploying contradictory projections systems (i.e. oblique, orthogonal, converging). Similarly my color is organized to evoke maximum ambiguity of the spatial ordering of the forms.

These paintings operate at a critical intersection of my own biography, my personal obsessions and a very significant turning point of the American landscape. I can only hope that the formal language of this work is adequate to these truly unprecedented spatial experiences.

—Steven Baris, Philadelphia, December 2013

...You forgot to enter postid in the gallery shortcode... All Images © Steven Baris. Courtesy of the artist.

Steven Baris’s recent project, “Exurban Archipelago” ran through the Summer and Fall, 2013, at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in Wilmington.

Editor’s Note:

Watch: Raul Romero‘s short documentary on Steven Baris’s Exurban Archipelago (Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts; 2013). Here.

Steven Baris at Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia and DM Contemporary, New York.

Follow: our ongoing discussion of artists’ responses to Land and Landscape, here.