Pay attention to your surroundings and however familiar they are, new patterns emerge.
Christopher Rodriguez’s* Sublime Cultivation* proves this point by taking iconic images of American landscapes that bring to mind the great westward expansion and combining them with images that place us firmly in the modern era. His work skews the antiquated idea of American splendor and reminds us of what the landscape has become: full of magnificent scenery, but increasingly imprinted with the crude footprint of humanity. The idea that no matter where you are, someone has been there already is inherent to Rodriguez’s work.
Sublime Cultivation was born when Rodriguez, looking back through his archive of photographs, realized there was a pattern to be found within them. He was drawn by the tension between what one expects to see and what is actually seen. With this in mind, he concentrated less on photographs that felt straightforward or documentary and chose archetypal landscapes, street photography, and abstractions. As a group, the images examine the tension between artifice and nature and the human impulse to understand nature through a constrained or even falsified version of it, like a theme park.
“There are fewer and fewer places that are pristine. This is ultimately changing our definition, dialogue and experience of nature," Rodriguez says. "People are experiencing the Great Barrier Reef and the Grand Canyon by taking an online tour. Eventually, the definition of natural will be indistinguishable from the simulation of it."
