Oliver Wasow: Landscapes

A fan of Wallace Nutting’s sentimental, hand-colored and early 20th century American cottage garden scenes, Oliver Wasow (b. 1960) has, for decades, been imagining what equally nostalgic and lushly colored, but harsher, future landscapes might look like. The environmental vistas he presents hover between romanticism and the uncanny. Image components in them are often appropriated, then manipulated through processing that’s ranged from collage and photocopying to Photoshop and artificial intelligence. The results are seductive works that straddle science and science fiction. Rather than offering up naturalistic scenes that lull or delight, Wasow’s interests in technology and the environmental sublime remind us that our best and worst instincts and intentions may, down the road, lead us to unexpected places.