Tele Vistas

About

More Than Ponies will be sharing a gentle broadcast of daily views consisting of videos, live streams and webcam footage of picturesque landscapes from across the New Forest. Created with local communities and individuals, and accompanied by a series of events that explore landscape, the picturesque and artists broadcasts. Drop by our website and follow our social media channels to view. #televistas

Tele Vistas is a series of artist commissions, events and community broadcasts of New Forest landscapes that explores the lure of a landscape during these unprecedented times. The image of the landscape, sea and forests invokes feelings of freedom and escape. With many of us isolated behind closed doors during the Covid-19 pandemic, the landscape has become an especially potent image, the closed horizons of the home contrast with the wide horizons of the outdoors. 

Commissioned artists are Adam Chodzko, Chris Welsby, Jennet Thomas, Jordan Baseman, Marcela Sinclair, Mick Peter and Rebecca Birch.

Tele Vistas is inspired by New Forest based William Gilpin, the great writer of the picturesque movement of the 18th century. His ideas of the ‘Picturesque’ transformed the land from a lived reality into an image for consumption, inspiring painters, writers, garden designers and even urban planners. Where once visitors journeyed by car or train to national parks, now they must transport themselves digitally. If this seems like a new situation, it is not: landscapes are by definition something remote, the impossible object of one’s desires (we stand and gaze, but cannot touch). 

The prefix ‘tele-’ is from the Greek for ‘far-off’, and gives us words such as telescope, television, telephone, telekinesis. This idea relates deeply to the notion of gazing at a landscape, of observing or consuming nature and the rural. Such gazing is often seen through a lens (the birder’s binoculars, the video lens, the High Definition imaging of a smartphone), and consumed on screens (television, laptop, tablet, phone). In this technological age, the near and the far are complementary rather than opposites, distances collapse, new spaces are created.

AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2020  

A series of specially commissioned artworks will be exhibited online by an international roster of artists who will have experienced our broadcast of landscapes from afar. These artwork may intervene with recorded footage or create new broadcasts with local collaborators, be digital animations or IRL objects in the landscapes. Commissioned artists are Adam Chodzko, Chris Welsby, Jennet Thomas, Jordan Baseman, Marcela Sinclair, Mick Peter and Rebecca Birch.