Livingston County 2 1972

Curator: Standing before us is Art Salazar’s 1972 etching, “Livingston County 2.” It’s a print, rendered entirely in monochrome. Editor: My first thought is the unsettling contrast; the ordered rows of… pebbles? juxtaposed against a looser, almost chaotic field of… are those tanks? And a monolithic telephone pole slicing through it all. It creates a deeply unnerving tension. Curator: Indeed. The "pebbles" may be a comment on manicured landscapes and industrialised land use. The horizon line crowded with military tanks seems a nod to mechanized farming practices encroaching nature. That telephone pole - I read it as a technological imposition on a natural setting, like a signifier of human ‘progress’. Editor: The etching technique enhances that stark contrast. Look at the bottom half – such density and detail of tone. Then, moving upwards, it's airier and almost ethereal; the grain becoming finer, evoking both fields and the coldness of steel. Curator: Exactly! Those dense organic shapes evoke a specific cultural memory of rural landscapes versus a mechanized modern existence, speaking to a tension prevalent in 70s America: a disconnect between lived experience and collective narratives surrounding progress and control. What strikes you about it now? Editor: Still, that stark geometry dominates. That solid vertical cuts right through all other attempts at pictorial depth and throws the picture plane forward - it becomes both an actual marker of physical space, and symbolic barrier between contrasting parts of the landscape and competing methods for its domination. Curator: It definitely creates a dynamic visual dichotomy, forcing the viewer to consider their positionality within these changing spaces, their relation with nature and technology - I mean how the two constantly change one another, often violently. Editor: The artist manages to condense immense complexity into these layered forms. Looking back on the etching now, I feel unsettled with questions: what really "improves" our surroundings, when order comes into discord and so many resources come with exploitation. Curator: Likewise, the etching is an invitation to reflect on landscape beyond picturesque notions, to acknowledge complex history, industrial effects and possible trajectories impacting places that surround and define our existence.