LOS ANGELES, CA.-USC Fisher Gallery presents the exhibition Contemporary Soliloquies on the Natural World: Karen Carson, Merion Estes, Constance Mallinson, Margaret Nielsen, and Takako Yamaguchi . Organized by USC Fisher Gallery curators Max F. Schulz and Ariadni Liokatis, the exhibition will be on view through January 21, 2006. Contemporary Soliloquies on the Natural World will feature 51 paintings by five Los Angeles artists who have embraced and challenged the age-old landscape tradition.

This exhibition validates the vitality of the genre despite the neglect into which it fell during most part of the twentieth century. USC Fisher Gallery's exhibition offers the public a selection of works which provide an unexpected representation of the current state of the natural world. The artists' paintings on view showcase recently produced works and reveal some new developments in the genre at a national level. Rather than continuing to endorse the longstanding idealized scenes of natural Arcadian beauty, these artists chose to portrait a nature that has been transformed into a human and artificial construction. To the five artists, the genre's structuring of the “landscape” is an anachronism. Theirs is a radical critique of a natural world in crisis.

The five artists exhibited in Contemporary Soliloquies on the Natural World strive to create art that evokes and fosters intensity of thought and feelings that they experience towards socio-ecological issues of late coming aggressively to the fore. Karen Carson, for instance, concerns herself with the environmental and ecological health of the western regions of the United States with a series of paintings showcasing the elements of wind, fire, and rain. She utilizes these elements to protest against the devastation of our planet. The landscapes of Merion Estes refuse to accept generalized assumptions about a perfect universe, but still reflect nature's vitality and wholeness. Not surprisingly, the forms of Estes' landscapes are narrowed to specific parts of the world, such as underwater, sky and garden views, looking both at the ugly and the beautiful that constitute nature's health. A global perspective is offered by artist Constance Mallinson, whose works offer world-wide overviews in an assemblage of the most heterogeneous scenes, presenting the viewers with civilization's shortcomings and abuses of nature. Margaret Nielsen explores the complex cycle of generation, life, death and regeneration implicit in nature's seasonal transformation by reaching towards space beyond earth and adapting her vocabulary to a cosmos series. Takako Yamaguchi blends abstractions and representations in meteorological paintings that play out the creation and destruction of the world, offering a taste of indeterminacy of the order of the universe.