BERKELEY, CA.- The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presents MATRIX 213: Some Forgotten Place, an exhibition of works by contemporary painters from around the world who are exploring the subject of landscape as something more than a definition of place. On view through December 19, 2004, the exhibition includes the work of eight artists: Mamma Andersson (Sweden), Amy Cutler (United States), Makiko Kudo (Japan), Saskia Leek (New Zealand), James Morrison (Australia), Aaron Morse (United States), Wilhelm Sasnal (Poland), and Amelie von Wulffen (Germany).

In keeping with the MATRIX tradition of facilitating new, open modes of analysis, Some Forgotten Place presents artists who challenge the principal historical types of landscape painting (symbolic, factual, ideal, pastoral, and artificial) by recreating the landscape as an intellectually and emotionally charged space. In the process, each painter incorporates a range of unexpected elements: myth, dreams, imagination, personal narrative, abstraction, and the psychological.

Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator, first began to consider this theme in painting several years ago when she saw Saskia Leek’s work on an announcement for an exhibition in Sydney. As she looked further, she began to notice a phenomenon in paintings by artists from various parts of the globe, in which “landscapes provided a moody, evocative environment, but with an undercurrent of something more disturbing, or slightly off — such as men peering at domestic scenes of young girls, birds and girls morphing, women attempting to escape something unseen, seasons cross pollinating,” Zuckerman Jacobson says. Over time, she narrowed her interest to this group of eight artists, whose works she found most unique and diverse, as they raise questions about the values and meanings implied by or inherent in place. “I started to think about how these images reflect our world today. Some artists included here provide a romantic type of longing for a more idyllic time, others reflect the rupture between how we want the world to be and how it actually is, still others leave the real and manifest the imagined, the mythical, the magical.”