The exhibition contains photographs, a video installation, and several sculptural forms, which bracket and punctuate the gallery space. The photographs, grouped and then positioned at regular intervals, appear initially to be vague color-field abstractions. But a seductive recognizibility, along with parentheticals in the titles that point to location or substance, invite the viewer to re-perceive the images as natural forms, landscapes even.

Before examining Tellería-Díez’s relocation of landscape into perceptive space, it is worth looking, for a moment, at landscape, not as reflective of an original referent but rather as representation of an idea. In her essay The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition, Rosalind Krauss invokes the description of a 19th century English country walk in Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey. In the scene, a local reverend and his son evaluate the suitability of various vistas for artistic rendering, on the basis of their endowments of certain ‘natural’ qualities, which represent collectively held notions of the picturesque. In essence, they judge nature on the basis of its suitability to stand in for a pre-existing mental (and linguistic) construction of an idea, landscape. And so, Krauss argues, “landscape becomes a reduplication of a picture which preceded it.” The stock Platonic idea that nature itself is condemned to being a representation, is reasserted by Krauss as a poststructuralist paradigm, where a whole chain of deferrals from signification inevitably point the viewer away from the place of meaning.

Here, where nature is constructed as the representation of its own absence, Tellería-Díez begins her investigations. For the series of color photographs displayed at Fusebox, Tellería-Díez took close-ups of sky, water, sand or algae, formatted them into squares, and bonded the images to plexiglass panels, which were then set away from the wall. By zooming in with a telescopic lens to one small fragment of a putative whole, the artist has shifted the landscape away from its iconic identity within its own tradition and into the space of abstraction. As its linguistic and historical identifiers begin to evaporate, so to do the inevitable references to landscape, leaving a precarious image that seems to reside in the flickering space between signification and the attempted refusal of it. The final inversion is the reification of the image into object as completed by its permanent assignment to the plexiglass panel, reconstituting the image into its own framing devise. Thus the artist, in her understated way, points the viewer away from the object itself, and to a kind of perceptual space that veils it.

If the photographic panels, on some level, convert image into object, the sculptural forms, which punctuate the gallery space, spill back into the territory of image. Constructed out of fiberglass and hydrocal, they are painted with the meticulousness of a Bierstadt, while evoking a range of associations from Carl Andre’s Scatter Pieces to Artschwager’s Blps to Piero Gilardi’s Tapeti natura. White and smooth, like riverstones (or microbes), they gather in order formations, at once occupying and dividing the architectural space that contains them. Carefully painted in the front, with high-key and low-contrast horizontal zones, the back of each form reflects a glowing sky blue that creates a light effect upon the form behind it. Thus, the classical vocabulary of landscape painting – shadow, modeling, light effects – is employed to veil the very physicality elicited by the form’s material identity as sculpture. Here the material referent, reproduces the relation Krauss observed between a real landscape as a signifier of an idea that precedes it and its representation in art.

The third area of investigation on a small video screen, installed flush to the wall in a corner of the gallery. MIA-JFK, an 8 minute 31 second looped video of sky footage, taken from an airplane window, as the artist traveled between Miami and New York, is another parable against the double reification of perceptive experience into viewer/object. Neither taking off nor landing, the moving images reside completely in the between spaces, bracketed by time. Unlike Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s motorcycle ride through Rome, where an attached camera records in a single shot a real-time journey from point A to B, MIA-JFK invites us to experience a dotted-line of separate real times without a beginning or end. Instead of a journey marked by different landscapes, as in the artist’s photographic panels, MIA-JFK conjures up a monotonous series of sky views located within a set of conceptual parentheses.

If an image of nature or otherwise can only reside in the moment of our perception of it, Marisa Tellería-Díez shifts the focus from the instantaneous consumption of an image to an argument for the impossibility of such consumption. She offers a universe of endless deferrals away from the place of meaning to the between space where the act of perception is always begun but never completed.

– Paula Crawford, artist and critic
Washington, DC, 2003.