Rita Robillard at Elizabeth Leach - Portland, Ore - Brief Article

The spirit of Lewis and Clark haunted Rita Robillard's exhibition of landscape paintings and mixed-medium collages. Not that a casual viewer would discern the pattern of an early 19th-century Corps of Discovery map beneath the layered pigments of View of Gorge, an expansive, six-panel painting of the Columbia River wending its way to the Pacific. Scenic as this region is, with its mountain vistas and verdant forests, it's not simply natural beauty that intrigues Robillard. She explores the transformations of geography through history, how cultural impositions on nature establish a sense of place.

In Gardens and Vistas, a circular photograph of a giant carp among lily pads is superimposed on a square screenprinted landscape--again a picturesque river view--bathed in the reddish glow of oblique sunlight. Robillard appropriated the latter view from an antique engraving, a vision of the West from the era of Bierstadt and Church. The carp swims in the pool of the formal Japanese Garden, a popular attraction in contemporary Portland. The juxtaposition of these two images creates myriad contrasts: now/ then, artifice/wilderness, alien/ native, East/West. Robillard exploited the rich possibilities of this strategy throughout the exhibition, presenting disk-shaped "snapshots" of Portland today against backdrops lifted from illustrated 19th-century travel books or government surveys. Thus Art Deco architectural elements, riveted beams of steel bridges, and classical sculptural reliefs appear in tondos that float on scenes of Oregon as it was encountered by explorers and pioneers.

The tondo in Brewery shows an industrial edifice under demolition. A semi-ruin, the monument gives way to "development" as has the forested landscape in the printed background. Often the sylvan backgrounds in these collages derive from several different illustrations; the sunsets, waterfalls, bluffs and valleys are scanned, enlarged, transferred and gorgeously printed, sometimes in gold. Their mediated quality aligns these images with memories that mutate, blend, shimmer and fade. But the collaged photographic sights of the city are similarly filtered, through digital technology that makes the linear vocabulary of engraved illustrations seem archaic indeed. At the center of the exhibition, the artist arranged nine of these collages in a large grid, analogous to the ordering of the once-irregular natural site by streets and city blocks. The floating circles evoke the camera's lens, which organizes modern experience in a way unknown to Lewis and Clark. Through format and process in these thoughtful and beautiful works of art, Robillard acknowledges how human intervention--and vision itself--structure the modern world.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group