Alex Callender Exhibit: American Lawn

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!

In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?

Historical materials like 18th Century merchant ledgers, venture tourism steamships, and the photos and company charters of the Boston Fruit Company (later, the United Fruit Company), speak to us of the economic waterways connecting trade, banking, and financial instruments of the American Northeast to other slave societies of the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In this painted world, spaces across geographical relations are layered, tethered by shared social and ecological histories, possibility, and longing. The settler landscape becomes unsettled, while figures emerge in the shadow of grasses to confront each other or sometimes hold each other. Often situated close to the foreground, the lawn becomes a stage or interstitial space, filled with historical remnants, overgrowth, and folds of blue fabric that look sometimes like rolls of colonial indigo textiles and sometimes like blue plastic tarpaulin, a material that reminds us of both endless development and its aftermath. In these works the lawn delineates a politics of middle distance — both foreground and background, you stand on it and walk in between it, only sometimes thinking about the kinds of erasure the space bears witness to.

Learn more HERE!