Smeared, flattened, and rough around the edges, Gregory Euclide’s mixed-media collages explore nature through the lens of human experience. Organically meandering outlines suggest shallow reliefs; foraged prairie botanicals complement human-made materials; and abstracted landscapes emerge from drawings, photographs, ripped paper, paint, and more.
“The artist tears and layers these elements to build a new pictorial space which more accurately resembles the way he takes in the land,” says a gallery statement for Assembled Lands, Euclide’s solo exhibition opening later this week with Hashimoto Contemporary.
Breaking down his observations of nature into its fundamental parts, Euclide merges overviews of trees, shrubs, meadows, and the horizon with the intimate details of leaves or branches. One might approach his subject matter through the lens of the Anthropocene, which describes our present era of accelerating changes to the environment due to humans’ unrelenting impact.
Each collage (previously) merges recognizable forms and terrain with abstract shapes and compositional spirals or whorls. The effect toys with perception and our understanding of relationships between flatness and depth, land and sky, and nature and ourselves.
Assembled Lands runs from May 17 to June 14 in New York City. See more on the artist’s website.
