Miles and Miles, Chaw'se Acorn Grinding Rock, Miwok Indians, Amador County, California 1998

Sally Larsen made "Miles and Miles, Chaw'se Acorn Grinding Rock, Miwok Indians, Amador County, California," using, well, I wish I knew! The sepia tones give it this dreamy, vintage feel, like a memory half-forgotten, half-imagined. The composition, though, is what really grabs me: those vertical bands slicing through the landscape, almost like the view through a screen or a distorted lens. There's this tension between the flatness of the picture plane and the depth of the landscape, a push and pull between abstraction and representation. And those marks scattered across the surface, like ghostly echoes or the imprint of time itself, they remind me of the rock art of Agnes Martin. Is it a commentary on how we perceive the natural world? Or is Larsen inviting us to see the landscape as a kind of abstract composition, a field of marks and textures? Either way, it gets you thinking about how we construct our reality, one mark, one layer at a time.