Matthew Smith: The making of the landscape

About

Smith's projects in sculpture, drawing, photography and video share a concern with fictionalised and idealised representations of nature and of place, rejecting the idea of one all-encompassing original 'nature' in favour of infinite interpretations, copies and inventions of the natural. He takes as subject matter the utopian pastoral scenes of advertising, food packaging, maps, postcards, tourist brochures or the disjunctions that often exist between the images of billboard advertising and the locations of those billboards. Smith explores, reveals and navigates a way through these myriad natures.

'The making of the landscape' is Smith's first solo exhibition at Vane, consisting of drawn, photographic and painted works produced over the last decade. Imaginary topographies are created using the convention of the contour lines of map makers; parts of the English coastline are rearranged to form new and uncanny islands; photographs of nondescript motorway junction signs are delicately hand-coloured as if they were Victorian postcards of beauty spots; drawings depicting the different species of native British wildlife, taken from a guide are rendered in such a way that there is no distinction between the 'common' and 'endangered'; an horizon is composed of corporate logos themselves based on images of snow-capped mountains.

Smith questions how these images inform our experience of the natural world and how these manipulated representations become part of our understanding of the reality around us. He reveals our belief in nature as something seemingly more authentic and more 'real' than our man-made, urban environment to be a nostalgic hankering after some imaginary idealised past way of living.