Shabtai Pinchevsky and Katherine Simóne Reynolds: A Bruising Gaze on a Faltering Landscape

“Following the credits, a boat glides down a thick, green river. Standing near the front of the boat is a woman in a long white dress and a large veiled hat. The image is familiar from dominant cinema’s colonialism-as-entertainment genre. But we notice that this woman stands hipshot, chin cocked, one arm akimbo. These ebonics signify that filmmaker Dash has appropriated the image from reactionary cinema for an emancipatory purpose. She intends to heal our imperialized eyes.” 
—Toni Cade Bambara, from the preface for Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film

“How does a country look to the world? How does the world look to a country? And how can the landscape itself be said to have a perspective? Does this not suggest, quite literally, that the landscape looks back in some way at its beholders, returning their gaze with a blank, impassive stare, its face scarred with the traces of violence and destruction and (even more important) with the violent constructions that erupt on its surface?”
—W. J. T. Mitchell, Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness

Let us gaze upon a scene that is meant to garner a presence of security. 

Secure in upholding a false notion pertaining to an archive built on absent concepts. The pairing of a familiar melancholic midwestern landscape with the hermeneutics of a preserved view of Jerusalem, combined to complicate the focus of what actually is being seen, and the implications of a gaze that has been compromised in the process. Through video, sound, sculpture and installation, this exhibition brings in questions of perception, scene and seen, and whether this gaze is one of warning or surveillance.

A Bruising Gaze on a Faltering Landscape is the culminating thesis work of Shabtai Pinchevsky and Katherine Simóne Reynolds, candidates of the 2021 MFA degree program in Art, Theory, Practice, at Northwestern University. 

The Block Museum of Art is free and open to all. At this time, limited in-person appointments are available in accordance with the University Return to Campus Policy. Visit the exhibition website for tickets and up-to-date visitor information. Visit the Events page on the A,T,P, website to RSVP for virtual programming. Documentation of the exhibition will be viewable online beginning May 6.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Myers Foundation, the Jane & Francis Purtell Endowed Fund, the Jerrold Loebl Fund for the Arts, the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, The Graduate School, and The Block Museum of Art.