The Amazing Photomontages Of Landscape Architects

Gary Hilderbrand, Glass House Reflections II
2012, Handcut collage/montage, offset print, handmade paper, 6”h x 5”w. Private Collection

Landscape architecture is a vital and well-established field, so it is somewhat surprising that while plenty of museums put on architecture exhibitions, few incorporate landscape explicitly as its own discipline. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum corrects this imbalance with its first landscape show, Composite Landscapes: Photomontage and Landscape Architecture, which runs until September 2.

As the name points out, the exhibition will focus on one of the field’s primary techniques for visualizing the concepts, experiential quality, and temporal aspects of landscape design, as contributed by practitioners such as James Corner, Michael Van Valkenburgh, Superstudio, David Hockney, and Isabella Gardner herself, among many others.

The importance of the exhibition is hard to overstate, since it highlights an image-making technique that has been transformational well beyond the bounds of landscape architecture, having filtered over into the architecture and art worlds as well. Though the popularity of photomontage has waxed and waned periodically since its first use at the very dawn of photography, its versatility has lent it the ability to respond to various representational demands, from Dadaist satire to phenomenological investigation. The Gardner Museum exhibition celebrates these various uses of the form during its long and artful history.

source:
Gary Hilderbrand, Glass House Reflections II
2012, Handcut collage/montage, offset print, handmade paper, 6”h x 5”w. Private Collection