Beau Carey

Duino Elegy

2024

By using references to navigational coastal profiling and by borrowing and subverting compositional structures of the 19th century American landscape painters I examine how modern landscapes came to be spatially constructed. Through a combination of on-site field studies and larger studio pieces I make bodies of work that reflect the individual characteristics of a specific place while retaining a critical awareness of the landscape genre. This practice, while fully absorbed into the cliché of modern landscape painting, is not innocuous. It is rooted in a history of globalism and environmental dominance. Through my work I explore this spatial language at times allowing individual works to teeter into abstraction. The works in Rise look specifically at how we will navigate and view a rapidly changing physical world.