Gail Salzman, Resonance, 2005. Oil on linen, 36" x 32"

New Turf brings together fifteen artists from across the nation who upend conventional notions about the means by which we represent the landscape. Featuring recent paintings, drawings, photographs, sound works, and site-specific installations, New Turf surveys an array of innovative approaches to the abstracted landscape - and testifies to American artists' fresh attentiveness to the rapidly changing environments around them. While the landscape has long attracted artists, those in New Turf have distinguished themselves with thought provoking, abstract works that make use of humor, politics, memory and perception, as well as new media and advanced technologies. From aerial photographs of contaminated sites and pencil drawings charting the layout of suburban big-box stores to paintings offering rigorous, formal explorations of nature's light, color space, and mood, New Turf maps the diverse terrain where landscape and abstraction meet.

Gail Salzman expands upon the tradition of spiritualized landscapes that give pictorial form to nature's animistic forces. Teaming with elemental forms that emerge gradually from layers of rich, luminous color, Salzman's paintings are inspired by the tidal pools of coastal Maine and the small pond adjacent to her Vermont studio. The artist uses translucent pigments applied with overlapping gestural brushwork to express the sensation of flowing water or the fleeting effects of sunlight refracting off its surface. Filtered through the passage of time, the original physical motifs are transformed into a deluge of pure color that threatens to spill over the edges of works such as Resonance (Pl. 15). Salzman's lush, intricate surfaces, meticulously built up and scraped down, seem to heave and surge in perpetual flux, recalling both the inner cadences of nature and the conversion of experience to memory.