liam maccormack
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The landscape has long been mythologized as a space of spiritual reverence; a place where one can become overwhelmed by the beauty and perfection of the natural world. The pureness of these spaces never existed, yet we still hold the land up to purity as a tool to gauge its worth. We have become so inundated with the ideals of what the landscape should be, that we have reduced it to parodies of itself. We can only see what has been shown to us before and we base our own experiences around this imagery. My work aims to dismantle this idealization of the land by depicting the construction of these very ideals and reducing them into their simplest parts.
The question that has continued to drive this work is, “What is it to experience the land in the 21st century?”
It is my belief that we are in a period of overwhelming non-location, and it is through this lens that we perceive our natural world. In a time when the lust for the natural has diminished, we are left with only signifiers of this antiquated untruth. It is no longer the land that needs to be defined, but the definitions themselves and their slippage into placelesness.
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Liam MacCormack is a Boston MA born artist currently working towards his BFA in photography at Lesley Art + Design. Interested in the interplay of physical and metaphysical space, his work deals with how our environments alter our mental perceptions and vice versa. MacCormack is the Co-Director of Gallery South, a by-students-for-students space in Cambridge Massachusetts. He currently resides in Boston with his cat Sampson, surrounded by artificial flowers.