Face to Face: April 2025
Join IMPULSE journalists on a visit to the studios of artists Rachel Rosheger, Elli Fotopoulou, Andrew Luk, Lesley Dill, Noga Cohen, Leonard Baby, Nick Brandt, Chris Cortez, Ester Petukhova, Noomah Jamal, and Robert Zehnder.
RACHEL ROSHEGER
Rachel Rosheger, Promise Machine (2025). Steel, glass, found objects, custom electronics, audio. 10 min. Image courtesy of the artist.
Rachel Rosheger’s studio is a trove of mechanical relics, each a living encapsulation of layered material histories. In her studio in Yale’s sculpture building, the first-year MFA student led me to Promise Machine (2025), a dusty vitrine housing mysterious metal parts, all bearing signs of age—a tarnished starburst-shaped cog, a small tin of shimmering metallic bits, a copper placard etched with indiscernible data. While leveraging anthropological display tactics, Rosheger lends theatrical intensity through a ten-minute voiceover, which she describes as “a sort of nonlinear genealogy of certain ubiquitous technologies.” The captivating and decidedly unsetting script melds fact and fiction, combining historical anecdotes and speculative vignettes. In a particularly pivotal, eerie moment, the algorithmically-generated voice addresses the listener directly from the perspective of AI: “I know what you are going to do next. I know if you are developing cardiovascular disease.” As an epistemological inquiry into the ideological underpinnings of technological “progress,” Promise Machine, which Rosheger debuted for her first-year spring critique, situates novel systems like ChatGPT within broader legacies of technologization premised on extractive capitalism.
Through the investigation of material histories, Rosheger assumes the role of media archaeologist, thinking beyond the intended function of now obsolete everyday objects to consider how such cultural debris factors into ever-evolving social systems. Simultaneously, Rosheger engages with alchemy as a spiritual practice that complicates designations of value according to capitalist strictures of use in this age of planned obsolescence.
On a nearby table, mismatched glass jars contain e-waste soaked in fluids colored by leaching chemicals. Rosheger foregrounds materiality in suggesting that an alchemist “must be highly sensitive to fundamental qualities in these materials and sees their lineages, former lives, and the way they have shaped the world.” In dealing with e-waste in particular, though, and thus recalling often dangerous, labor-intensive DIY techniques to extract minerals like gold, Rosheger underscores how the material flows of e-waste and the related raw materials reflect and reify geopolitical disparities.
As for what’s next for the multi-media artist nearing the end of her first year at Yale, Rosheger explains, “I’m honing in on contemporary ubiquitous black box technologies, the ways our already tenuous knowledge systems are in a particular crisis, and how those circumstances are being optimized for control by Big Tech.”
— Aidan Chisholm
ELLI FOTOPOULOU
Elli Fotopoulou’s studio in New Haven, Connecticut. Image courtesy of the artist.
Bright purple aerial fabrics hang from the ceiling of Elli Fotopoulou’s sun-bathed New Haven studio. The Greek sound artist explains that through acrobatics, as with climbing, she confronts her “apprehension to gravity” by exploring “how to experience balance in a state of inherent imbalance.” This meditation on spatial awareness evokes Fotopoulou’s emphasis on embodied experience throughout her sonic installations, which explore the materiality of sound as a sculptural medium and a tangible interstitial phenomenon.
Fotopoulou—a lifelong, classically trained cellist who grew up in a family of musicians—emphasizes that “sound has always been a key element to my being and perception of the world.” Recalling her mother’s daily training as a harpist while pregnant, the Athens-born artist explains, “The harp is an instrument that requires to be hugged to be played and rests upon the body and at the time, a big belly. Interestingly, touch is the first sense a fetus develops, and so through the vibrations of the harp, I was touched before I was seen. I later became a cellist, so I, too, picked a hug-able instrument with strings to have vibrations of my own.”
Fotopoulou’s process is fundamentally responsive to the visceral resonances of sound, together with the shifting properties of her materials, ranging from bamboo to Pine Rosin to steel, among other metals. The artist explains, “I am discovering sound as a shaping force that alters the surroundings and dictates what the work will look like, instead of the opposite.” Fotopoulou mentioned “discovery” not solely in reference to her own process, but also to describe the intuitive encounters she seeks to cultivate for visitors through her materially immersive installations.
At the core of Fotopoulou’s practice is the playfulness that is playing an instrument without training, without the goal of making music so much as sound. Fotopoulou invites me not merely to touch a cactus but to play the spines of a dead segment of a plant-cum-quasi-instrument, one of several included in the artist’s Hygroreceptions (2024), a synchronous sonic installation that linked sites in New Haven and Athens. Fotopoulou’s interest in mobilizing sound as a collective force dovetails with her commitment to teaching—currently at Welding Sculpture at Brooklyn College—as central to her artistic practice as “a platform to strengthen community and people.”
Looking ahead, Fotopoulou seeks to further explore the interrelational capacities of sound: “I am looking to create broader connections by sonic dislocation and simultaneity; more dual performances and responding impulses between here and Greece.”
— Aidan Chisholm
ANDREW LUK
Installation view of Crank, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.
Andrew Luk evokes mid-century dreams of cosmic expansion that have since curdled into something more fraught—spectacles of nostalgia, privatized industry, existential drift. In his corner studio, the second-year Yale MFA student reinstalled much of his recent thesis presentation, Crank, which centered on several found, reworked refrigerators suspended from racket straps. The illuminated cavities of the looming, asteroid-like appliances stripped of their outer shells are lined with golden mylar and collaged with imagery conjuring legacies of the “Space Race” of the 1960s, when extraterrestrial travel was as much a psychological project as a technological endeavor simultaneously central to Cold War geopolitical tensions. The repeated use of mylar blankets—a now ubiquitous technology in fact invented by NASA—exemplifies Luk’s interest in the proliferation of space-related innovations within popular culture, coupled with his broader emphasis on the meaning latent within materials, whether ramen, breadcrumbs, or found specimen trays.
Through a quasi-anthropological lens, Luk engages with shifting popular imaginaries of outer space, probing the very “human” tendencies revealed by extraterrestrial fantasies. Early in our visit, Andrew shows me a bag of Mars Global (MGS-1) High-Fidelity Martian Regolith Simulant, a mineralogical substance that supposedly mimics the Martian surface, which he utilizes in his Thale Cress series. Elsewhere, Luk incorporates gleaming cultural artifacts like a silver coin commemorating the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975, a personal token symbolizing the commodification of “space” as a popular industry, a market of memorabilia that plays into aspirational consumerism.
I depart Luk’s studio with a poster from Spaced (2024), a stack of flyers for the taking that list every non-human sent into space in chronological order. The lengthy list is both deeply amusing and unsettling as a sort of testament to the relentless pursuit of empirical knowledge tied to human exceptionalism, with fantasies of humanity as somehow distinct from the earthly domain of “nature” as therefore expendable. In Luk’s work, outer space is a remarkably accessible yet nonetheless conceptually layered phenomenon with shifting relevance, a topic that invites considering both histories and speculative futures, as envisioned in the past and the present.
— Aidan Chisholm
LESLEY DILL
Photo by Liz Sandler. Courtesy of Lesley Dill Studio.
Each day in artist Lesley Dill’s studio begins and ends with poetry. She convenes with her team of interns in the studio in her Brooklyn Heights apartment three days a week. As the day begins, she chooses a poem at random from her Johnson edition of 1,775 Emily Dickinson poems and passes the book around, with everyone reading a line. Throughout the day, the team works together on Dill’s current work in progress, working title “This Private Hallucinatory Moment,” each choosing a phrase from Dickinson’s poetry to stencil and then sew onto organza-backed copper cutouts of what Dill refers to as “electric ladies.” They close the day with a reading of either an original poem by intern Sparrow Murray or a translation of Dickinson into one of the interns’ other languages: Finnish, Mandarin, Spanish, and perhaps more languages to come.
“This Private Hallucinatory Moment” is a result of Dill’s 2023-2024 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship on outsider artists and late-1800s science (think electricity, magnetism, X-rays). “I think the overlap between art and science is discovery and adventure,” Dill said. “I was driven to make something of hidden glory, incorporating chemicals and feelings of discovery.” (Chemistry has been part of the artistic process: Dill and one of her interns used substances like salt and liver of sulfur to create unique patinas and iridescence on sheets of copper out on her fire escape.) Dill wanted to give the figures a feeling of “rising up,” which they do in more ways than one. They are fiery, fervent figures inspired by Indigenous healers, outsider artists, and both real and trickster scientists. And at an expansive 13 by 26 feet, the piece is designed to fill an exhibition wall at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, where it will land in December 2025. Until then, Dill and her team will keep immersing themselves and the electric ladies on the wall in poetry.
— Molly MacGilbert
NOGA COHEN
Courtesy of Noga Cohen.
At the LMCC Arts Center on Governors Island, Noga Cohen’s residency studio finds itself in an open floor plan, facing a large window with a waterfront view. In Cohen’s work, plastic—both biodegradable and petroleum-based—is poetic in its metaphor and has the capacity to embody a reckoning with collective trauma. “Plastic never fully decomposes,” she says. “It eventually breaks down into microplastics that accumulate in natural ecosystems and in our bodies. In my work, plastic represents this elusive duality: it is both disposable and eternal.”
Cohen’s sculptural practice is deeply attuned to the lifecycle of materials, from synthetic detritus to handmade bioplastics with natural materials such as flowers, coffee, sand, seaweed, or light-sensitive chemicals integrated into them. This shift towards the self-fashioned mirrors an existential turn in her thinking. “Transitioning from synthetic materials to biodegradable ones has been liberating,” she reflects. “Watching my work shrink, expand, wrinkle, soften, become moist, or change color mirrors the experience of living in a human body.” At the heart of her work is an insistence that materials carry affective and ecological memory. After the 2024 wildfires in New York, Cohen collected charred wood from burn sites near her home and folded them into her work. “These pieces serve as both physical and symbolic traces of ecological trauma. Collecting these fragments is also a way of observing the landscape.”
In I Got Lost In The Botanical Gardens, cherry blossom petals were pressed inside silicon suction cups, trapped in suspended animation. The gesture is at once clinical and tender. “I use these materials to connect with the body, memory, and time,” she explains. “My practice is process-based, and I’m curious about how different materials behave when they are no longer ‘in place.’” Her relationship to ecology, she says, is inseparable from the body. Informed by thinkers like Daisy Hildyard and Jane Bennett, Cohen sees the body not as a sealed container but as a porous, shifting site of exchange. “The ecological crisis we’re living through is not separate from our personal experiences of loss and trauma,” she says. “Ephemerality, for me, is more about what lingers than about what disappears—what leaves a trace and what becomes something else entirely.” Through acts of decomposition and transformation, Cohen creates a language of residue—one in which plastic and petals alike speak to the fragile, entangled states of being we inhabit.
— Xuezhu Jenny Wang
LEONARD BABY
Leonard Baby at his studio. Courtesy of the artist.
Little did Leonard Baby (b. 1996) know what life was going to be like when he moved from Colorado to New York in 2014 after finishing high school. He was an eighteen-year-old young man who was trying to make a living in the city, taking any job he could find; he was a nanny, a doorman and worked at the movie theater Metrograph. But despite the uncertainty of those years, there was one thing that remained constant in his life: painting. From a young age, he would take art classes and was always sketching and painting on the side. Everything changed during the pandemic when people started inquiring about his almost hyper-realistic still movies posted on Instagram, and that increasing interest allowed him to quit his multiple jobs to focus on his art. By a stroke of luck (or destiny), painting became his whole world.
Leonard Baby’s studio is his home, an apartment in Brooklyn where he lives with his dog. As the door opens, the first thing I see are brushes, traces of paint, works hanging on the soft yellow walls, and others scattered on the floor. I was expecting to see a hand gracefully picking up a glass of champagne or the details of a well-fitted dress—motifs often found in his earlier works, but instead, there were medium and large portraits depicting Baby’s sisters—the “angels,” as he calls them—posing in their mother’s living room, some of them sitting on a sofa, a bed, or the floor. The muted colors, the vintage-style clothing, and the staged compositions evoke a feeling of nostalgia. In another painting, the artist portrayed his partner lying naked in bed. With a more vibrant color palette, this piece conveys a deeper sense of intimacy, offering a glimpse of the artist’s inner world while revealing his sensitivity and skill as a portraitist.
Baby started working on this series almost a year ago, “I was inspired by the Bryan Organ’s portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It’s an acrylic on canvas, and it’s unusual to see a portrait made with acrylic. I was also inspired by a painting named Three Sisters, which is a group of girls lingering around. I wanted to explore and translate all those sources of inspiration into something that made sense to me.” This new body of work is currently on display at THE BABYS, the artist’s solo show at Half Gallery, which runs through April 24th, 2025. I ask him, “Will you take a break after the show closes?” “Maybe for three days,” he replies. “I would go crazy if I ever stop painting.”
— Montserrat Miranda Ayejes
NICK BRANDT
Nick Brandt, F’taim and Family, Jordan, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.
For some, the climate crisis is a faceless entity: an ever-moving and inescapable chaos space which we need not confront, but merely bide the time until it takes us up with it. As photographer Nick Brandt virtually guided me through the 10-foot prints from The Echo of Our Voices, the fourth and latest installment of The Day May Break, his ongoing series on the climate crisis and the people living through it, it became clear that there were names to put to the destruction which has already wrought havoc on the parts of the world least responsible for carbon emissions—Laila, and Faisal, and Mariam, these are some of the people who must carry the brunt of the world unchecked industrialization has created. Brandt has traveled to these tender spaces which balance precariously on the brink of great tragedy and brought back with him their stories, their trauma, their resilience, and forces his viewer to face the world we have created head-on.
“I have a tendency when talking about the work that it can all seem a bit doom and gloom, and with this chapter, with The Echo of Our Voices, I do think the resilience of these people in the face of such adversity, in a way that we, living our comparatively cosseted lives in an industrial world can comprehend, is amazing,” Brandt tells IMPULSE. The Day May Break has taken Brandt to Fiji, Jordan, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, countries among the least responsible for global carbon emissions yet most acutely impacted due to the lack of social safety nets found in places like the United States and the European Union.
The Echo of Our Voices chronicles the lived experience of Syrian war refugees working in agriculture in Jordan. Living in the second most water-scarce country in the world, these families must constantly travel in order to find suitable growing conditions. “They've been living there 10 to 12 years, and because the only work they’ve been able to find is agricultural labor, they live these migrant lives, moving with their tents from place to place where there’s been sufficient rainfall,” Brandt says. For the series, Brandt placed his subjects upon pedestals in the Wadi Rum Desert, with vertical rocks and steep mountains in the background as if the subjects were rising above them, in a deeply symbolic gesture of uplifting. “It’s the symbolism of that desiccated world, and the visual echoes,” Brandt says.
Brandt worked with Iraqi researcher Lubna Yaseen Al Ajeeb, who had been working for years with Syrian families as an art therapist, to find subjects around Jordan. As he spent his first several weeks in Jordan traveling to meet these families, he was touched particularly by the familial bond and shared resilience of the Syrian refugees, who rely on each other for a sense of community and home in the face of persistent displacement and decided to focus the project specifically on them. “What I realized was there’s a whole extra layer of displacement, not just from the war, but now from climate change,” he says.
For Brandt personally, there are no surprise revelations to be had about the scale of catastrophe brought about by the climate crisis; at least, nothing that has not already been spelled out for us over and over by researchers: “I don’t think my photographs can begin to capture the full extent. All I can do is try and put a human face to what is happening.”
The Echo of Our Voices will be on view in a solo booth with Gilman Contemporary at AIPAD Art Fair, Park Armory, from April 23 to 26, 2025. The Day May Break was partially funded by Gallerie d’Italia Museum, Turin, which will host an exhibition of all four chapters of The Day May Break in March 2026.
— Zara Roy
CHRIS CORTEZ
Chris Cortez in her studio. Photo by Sterling Corum.
Dreamhouses can be art studios, too. That’s the world in which Mexican-American artist Chris Cortez works on her flashy paintings. Her space is an altar to Catholic iconography, queerness, and childhood fantasy. There’s a pink plastic Minecraft pig perched atop the windowsill next to her current project; she’s completely nude, save for her signature gilded jewelry, and trapped inside a shiny bubble, hurtling through space.
For a younger Cortez, the escapism of a video game was solace during her Catholic upbringing while navigating an isolating queer experience. “It was like me discovering that I loved all the girls and all the feminine aspects of the games,” said Cortez. Cortez said she feels called to work on certain paintings based on how she’s feeling, seeking strength in the super-powered versions of herself when going through spells of moodiness. “How can we interpret this sad, lonely feeling into something imaginative and playful and beautiful?” We turned our focus to an oil painting, a blonde Cortez whizzing through the cosmos on the back of a giant cartoon star (Zero Gravity, 2023). The piece is an ode to a “sexy” character from Super Smash Bros., a Nintendo game she played on trips to Mexico with her cousins, and a simultaneous reminder of embracing her femininity and identity as a trans woman to its fullest potential.
In La Nacimienta (2022), she gives birth in Christian Louboutin high heels, surrounded by three more versions of herself wearing diamond tiaras. “I remember I was watching America’s Next Top Model and screenshot a ton of scenes for the hair, the lighting,” said Cortez. “I want my work to exude that glamorous quality.” There’s nothing short of luxurious about Cortez’s work. Her detailed focus on manicured nails, a delicately laid necklace, or the baby strands of hair that cascade around her face emphasize her devotion to portraying the female form in a way that speaks to her understanding of beauty and self-love. After all, she is usually the primary subject.
The narrative in her paintings follows the dramatized storytelling at a church service, or just as equally, a telenovela. “The point is to put yourself into the religious iconography rather than being who you are,” she said. Processing these feelings is what inspired A la Rorro Niño (2022), a painting where she is feeding a mustachioed baby version of herself on one breast and a petite goat on the other. “It’s more commentary on religion rather than gender,” said Cortez.
Nuanced feelings toward religion haven’t deterred Cortez from her life as a spiritual person. “The older work was much more religious tale inspired, which was necessary for me to heal and make things make sense for me,” said Cortez. Her style has transitioned with this process, and in some of her more recent works, the focus has shifted to the pious love she felt for family and nature at home in Mexico. There’s an underlying presence in each of her paintings that feels pensive and ethereal, whether it’s moonlight striking through clouds (Bajo la Misma Luna, 2024) or the lush petals of a gently laid funeral rose (Y esta Rosa?, 2025), the depth of emotion behind the pieces is weighty regardless of the subject.
Cortez’s family has always supported her artistic talent, but only recently have they figured out how that can exist amidst queerness and religion; Cortez subscribes to both. Now, several years into her career, her parents helped her install pieces at her first solo exhibition and brought homemade traditional Mexican dishes to pass out to guests, all while singing her praises. “If you really love someone, you’re going to find a way to know how to love them,” she said. That sentiment rings true in all of her pieces: love for Mexico, her family, or herself.
— Sterling Corum
ESTER PETUKHOVA
Ester Petukhova, Changing of the Seasons (2024). Acrylic on canvas, 22 x 28 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Red swans, violet flowers, and the silky fragility of fabric in a distant memory: Ester Petukhova creates images across varied forms of visual accessibility. From wooden chests to interactive puzzles, she explores image-making through collage and construction founded upon serious research on what it means to be a post-Soviet person. Her practice is grounded in a grave concern with historical records and materials, rooted in her identification as a post-Soviet artist: a position where she has to fight against both the inhuman violence of contemporary Russia and the legacy of a communist empire. She is, however, constantly in search of transformations in diasporic possibilities, whether while “sifting through collected ephemera, digital images, films, conducting a series of interviews, or through free-form writing and research.”
Many of her works incorporate self-portraits. These paintings extend her identity into a public space, projecting her inner self into an observable reality. She does not perform for the audience; her many faces remain calm and contemplative—maybe even somber. Her pensive gaze flows outwards into a void that our eyes cannot follow, an awareness of which provides her command over those who would engage with her visual world. However, engagement is not in question, given how easily her paintings pull people into them.
The calm palette of her reality overlays a depth of melancholia—the gravity of a meditative body hidden under the softness of sweet, subdued colors. Their essence can be felt in the silence they exude, a feeling of approaching summer, a light cool breeze, a lazy afternoon snack, and the warm fragrance of black currant tea. Her investment in love and empathy slowly reveal themselves: the joy of her formative years, her experiences of art and literature, and her interactions with family and friends. Her engagement here with nostalgia is not predicated upon an obsession with the past, but a study of what the present demands; she indulges in retrospection but does not idly linger in the past. Her work is severely aware of the present moment and actively moves towards sustainability of the future self, and this is achieved through a deep understanding of history.
Petukhova’s most recent project Little Odessa, A Brighton Beach Anthology is an example of her commitment to research: a visual anthology exploring Brighton Beach's cultural shifts and post-Soviet migration since the 1970s. The book curates printed ephemera, architecture, menus, artworks, writings, and films, examining identity, language, and diaspora while reflecting on memory and cultural preservation.
— Abbas A. Malakar
NOORMAH JAMAL
Studio shot. Courtesy of the artist.
Palpable yet vague, present but fading, Noormah Jamal’s realm of memories is one that materializes as much as it hides. Jamal’s world is self-indulgent in a way, but at no point does it close its doors to the rest of us. A formal training in the traditions of subcontinental court paintings of Persia and the Mughal Empire further lays the foundation for the artist’s unique narrative visualization of lived experiences and nostalgic visions. The flowering language of her visuals, riding the waves of pastel colors and matte contrasts, constitutes a front for grave issues of socio-political realities.
Foundational to her work is an understanding of what home might mean, not just physically or in a diasporic, migratory context, but temporally or even emotionally. This “home” is where her paintings spend the greatest amount of time, whether through places, things, or people that anchor certain moments throughout her and her family’s lives to a visualization of an ever-illusive dimension. Her investment in the past goes beyond these experiences to the people of her land as well, where ceramic heads bloom from dead soil, and weeds encroach onto contested land. Seldom is an artist as masterful in bringing a practice to synthesis across such a vast difference in the use of mediums, from paintings on paper to glazed ceramics and installations.
Her work is heavy with not only her memories but also her narrative self. Although not immediately accessible to everyone, her languages Pashto and Urdu play a significant role in the paintings, sometimes becoming symbolic motifs across their landscapes. This is enhanced by her specific sensibility in using culturally relevant symbolism, composition, and marginal motifs ranging from flowers and words to heads of animals.
How far can a narrative self embody a painting? Jamal’s answer to this has been the dissociation of her entity into many time frames across her life, where her self-portraits are imbued with a cross-temporal consciousness. The naivete of these past selves are not replaced. Instead, they overlay the contemporary existence of a future being. This provides some of her characters, especially her self-portraits as a child, a gaze that knows the present and can pierce through its audience. Not only does this take away from the innocence of these personas, but it forces the audience to engage them with the severity that they demand.
As extremely personal as all of her work is, when the doors open into her reality, it is a communal experience barring none.
— Abbas A. Malakar
ROBERT ZEHNDER
Robert Zehnder’s painting is animated by his interest in mythology and fictive landscape. Over the past decade, the artist has considered cathedrals, the garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, and the wilderness as parameters to think through the mystery of natural landscape. Revisiting and reinterpreting conventions of landscape painting and cultural imaginaries in which nature is simultaneously the site of exile and use, Zehnder proposes nature as that which resolutely falls outside of our attempt for humanistic understanding. For his current exhibition Resurrection at Clearing, the story of Jesus Christ’s resurrection, specifically the physical loci and spiritual significance of the empty tomb, takes center stage. To Zehnder, the tomb is what the mind can do in the absence of the body. In his words, “tombs look like the facade of an unseen interior” where dialectics of disappearance and appearance hold interpretive multitude.
The artist first became interested in the story of Christ through his love for Renaissance paintings, which often disregard artificial boundaries between representation and reality. “Fra Angelico’s frescoes at the Museo Nazionale di San Marco always stood out to me,” Zehnder recalls, for in Angelico’s depictions of the Annunciation, the Lamentation, and the Resurrection, “the stone begins to look like fabric and mimics the arches of the wall the painting is framed within.” Zehnder is particularly drawn to this metaphysics in which the material world is ever more malleable and contains spiritual coding in all its transformation.
For Resurrection, Zehnder has read the Gnostic Gospels, which posit a different narrative of Jesus’s resurrection. “One interpretation is that the Resurrection was not physical but rather an internal reawakening. The tomb becomes a metaphor for hidden interiority and consciousness.” Zehnder muses. Throughout paintings of trees, ponds, and mountainous terrains, we see the mind materializing itself as organic topologies of vascular circulation, neural networks, and celestial tracks. Zehnder is fascinated by the “autogenetic ability” of these quasi-transcendental landscapes, becoming “semblances of systems, networks, and relationships” and hyperreal, plastic, and pop.
Constantly looking back into art history, Zehnder finds precedents in the tradition of landscape painting during the heights of German Romanticism. Citing Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), which strikingly rejects viewers’ ability to interpret the wanderer’s experience of the sublime, Zehnder proposes that his painting of nature is not about the sublime itself but rather negotiates “how we measure ourselves to it—whether we overcome it, or it will overcome us.” It’s an ageless affair between nature and culture.
— Qingyuan Deng