Amelia Bauer

Wasted Acres

September 2014

Amelia Bauer’s exhibition is a series of discrete investigations into our cultural conceptions of the natural world. She examines her surroundings through a lens of history and mythology. Aesthetic traditions are repositioned to create spaces that exist somewhere between our fears of the uncultivated wild and our romanticism of the “virgin” landscape. In this way Bauer explores the American experience of the frontier -- the transitional landscapes at the boundaries of civilization.

Bauer’s interventions, both photographic and sculptural, are representative of a distinctly American endeavor to bend nature to will yet also address the psychological and historical motivation underlying such efforts. Whether through applying decorative themes and gestures to materials found outdoors or interfacing directly with the environment itself, the outcome is a nuanced marriage of the inherently untamable and the age-old human desire for control.

For Wasted Acres, Bauer brings together a selection of works made against the backdrop of rural Central New York over the past four years.

View Amelia Bauer on Dose Projects

Exhibition Photography by Sasha Charoensub and Amelia Bauer