Gregory Euclide
American, born 1974Capture #4, 2009
Not on view
Acrylic paint, grass, paper, paint can, pencil, pine needles, juniper, lichen, moss, sedum, sponge
Dimensions12 × 13 × 16 in.
Museum Purchase, 2010.50
Gregory Euclide is an artist and teacher living in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. His attraction to the landscape originates from his experience of growing up in the rural landscapes of Wisconsin. Free to roam from farm field to forest edge, he developed an appreciation for authentic experience within the natural landscape. The complexity and interconnectedness of the environment had a profound impact on him as a child and would become the content and conceptual framework for his future work.
In Capture #4, Euclide takes paint and pours it on the land, capturing the local flora and terrain in the paint. On top of the paint, Euclide builds a diorama, depicting the concept of the idealized landscape framework. What the viewer sees in these pieces is more than any one concept - it is the interaction and interconnection between the actual land, the cultural idealization of the landscape, and the art-making process itself. Through this tension, these pieces address the issues of regeneration, recycling, growth and decay, the synthetic and the organic, and the very cycles driven by nature.
“My work explores the way we experience nature and how this is tied to the cultural practice of constructing landscapes as idealized images.”
