When the French Academy ranked the genres of art in the seventeenth century, landscape and still life were considered the least important as they did not involve human subject matter. However, the five artists in LAND / FORM approach landscape, not as something external to the human experience, but as a means of contemplating memory, body, and personal narrative. Here, landscape evokes the transience of earthly life, the affinity between the body and nature, and the centrality of place in the formation of memory and identity.

In her Terrains series (2013), Camila Escobar photographs the body, using its surfaces and curves as metaphors for landscape. Redell & Jimenez’s video work Expansion (2012) also abstracts the human form, but juxtaposes the artists’ amorphous movement with the stillness of their natural surroundings. Madhini Nirmal’s monotypes depict the flora and fauna of the forested area near Chennai, India where the artist grew up, and the urban development that is altering this landscape. In All Earth Moves the Same Way (2016), Duy Hoàng creates a timeline connecting milestones from his late father’s life with dates important to our understanding of Earth and the cosmos, alluding to the brevity of human existence relative to geological time. Maika’i Tubbs repurposes found objects and transforms them into artworks that resemble stones and boulders, returning the artificial and man-made to the realm of nature.