Landscape ReEnvisioned Exhibition On the Monterey Museum of Art

Compiled by Debra Achen

In the Monterey Bay Area, house of the famend West Coast Photography motion, panorama images is a beloved custom and supply of native delight. But how do photographers reply at this time, when a lot of the pure world is in danger? This query was prime of thoughts for Helaine Glick, curator of the Landscape ReEnvisioned exhibition, on view via April 26, 2026 at Monterey Museum of Art.

Landscape ReEnvisioned options the paintings of Debra Achen, Tony Bellaver, Adrienne Defendi, Charlotte Schmid-Maybach, Brian Taylor, and Vincent James Waring. Glick feedback: “New complexities in the landscape inspire these artists to find more meaningful ways to depict what once seemed a straightforward and familiar subject. Their work takes shape in multiple mediums, including prints made with cyanotype and gum bichromate, as well as in tapestry, books, collage, and sculpture. They explore the character or beauty of a particular place, bear witness to environmental conditions or events, forewarn of potential peril, or document newly revealed resilience. What they all share is an approach that reaches beyond traditional photographic practice.”

The Artists 

The hand-folded, torn, scorched, and woven prints on show from Debra Achen’s Folding and Mending mission convey “the world folding in on itself” from the impacts of local weather change. She notes, “As record storms and wildfires wreak havoc on our forests and communities, our ecosystems are unraveling at an alarming rate. My hand-manipulated photographs allude to the results. Coastlines erode and submerge as sea levels rise. Trees and forests, stressed from years of drought, succumb to disease and fire. Grasslands and wetlands shrink, and extinctions increase. All at the hand of mankind.” The stitching in Achen’s collages and sculptures is a metaphor for the restoration wanted to make our world complete once more. Her photo-sculptures communicate to how knowledgeable choices concerning the merchandise we buy and use each day affect the course of our local weather disaster. “Nature is resilient and our impacts can be reversed,” she says, “do we have the resolve to make change happen?”

Instagram: @debbieachen

Tony Bellaver doesn’t have a particular loyalty to anybody medium, however has all the time liked utilizing images as a component in his work. He makes use of a wide range of cameras for his photos, starting from giant format to classic bellows cameras. His personal hand-embellished journey sketchbooks and journals present the first supply materials for his progressive multi-media works. Spending days in nature to hike and fly-fish, he images, writes poetry, paints and attracts, and collects natural supplies, recording the expertise as he goes. Back within the studio he types and sifts and brings all of it collectively in layered, artist book-sculptures. Ralph Nader and Gordon Parks are two of his main influences. As he states, “I heard Ralph Nader speak, and something he said I never forgot. He spoke about using your talent, whatever it was, being an artist, a poet, a lawyer, a journalist, to fight back against the injustice that you see. Gordon Parks said, “A camera is a weapon against poverty, racism,  and discrimination. The camera could be used to expose injustices and bring about change in what we witness. I feel we have a moral obligation to do so.”

Instagram: @tonyvictorbellaver

In the aftermath of the CZU Lightning Complex fires (August 2020) within the Santa Cruz mountains, visible artist, Adrienne Defendi documented the charred panorama, forests, and residential properties in a number of variations. She says, “In my art practice, I am interested in how repetition can be generative, as in my insistent use of the iconic Mother Tree canopy (in Big Basin State Park), fragmented and recomposed, intimating the cyclical nature of destruction and renewal.” She additionally photographed the quite a few brush piles amassed by those that labored within the park for its revival and for a extra sustainable future. She notes, “Brush piles remind me of burial mounds, marking loss and remembrance and transformation. In response, I created photographic “bricks” depicting a wide range of mounds and brush piles fusing them with beeswax in sedimentary layers of burn-scar charcoal ash and botanicals. Each brick can stand alone, but within the act of putting one upon one other, I commemorate loss within the hope for collective renewal. It takes take labor to chart loss. It takes quietude and stillness to understand increments of change, hidden magnificence, commonality.”

Instagram: @adrienne_defendi

Charlotte Schmid-Maybach works with images, fabric, and thread to create her photographic textile items. Using her interdisciplinary method, she focuses on themes of nature, delusion, and legend, with an emphasis on forests and timber. Sewing is a technique that Schmid-Maybach “gets her hands into” the {photograph}. She says, “I sew on my prints with a free-motion sewing machine, like drawing with thread. The colored metallic and cotton fibers change the paper into something dimensional and textural. This intervention blurs the line between what’s real in the photograph and what’s beyond the picture, and its intricacy invites the viewer to take a closer look. The finished pieces feel like tapestry.” Most not too long ago, Schmid-Maybach has printed her images on silk. Layering the printed gauze over her sewn photos each deepens the items and emphasizes their ethereal high quality. She observes, “It’s as if I’ve found a way to print a layer of fog and add it to my process. This misty layer creates a space, an elsewhere, that only exists in imagination or memory.”

Intagram: @ clsmstudio

Brian Taylor is thought for his progressive explorations of different photographic processes, together with historic nineteenth-century printing methods, combined media, and illustrated handmade books. His photos evoke antiquated sketchbooks, typically introduced as full-page spreads in open books, or free pages “torn” from journals. “My sketches,” he says, “spring from a desire to incorporate more of my daily experience into my art and more art into my daily life. The artworks depict the world in front of my camera and include hand drawings, watercolors, and collage on the print surface to conjure up images from my imagination of scenes I wish I’d seen.” Taylor relishes revealing indicators of his hand in his artworks – fingerprints, brush marks, and imperfections akin to these present in distressed, historic paperwork. He is drawn to artistic strategies that enable for shock. “I welcome imperfections and textures in unpredictable, temperamental, and quixotic photographic processes. In this virtual age, I savor the tactile pleasures of making art by hand; I believe that a work of art created by a human touch may contain a resonance of that touch, a lingering aura.”

Vincent James Waring merges the handmade with the technological, weaving collectively design, drawing, portray, and images into luminous blue works. Subtle and contemplative, his works discover the layers of reciprocal forces current in every second and encourage a deeper appreciation for the sweetness, fragility, and resiliency of life. In Waring’s phrases, “These landscape portraits function as self-portraits, though the human figure is absent, and instead reveal how our presence shapes and is shaped by the natural world. The work seeks to illuminate our transformative power—both as destructive actors and as potential stewards within greater ecological systems.” His cyanotype photos start as wash work, the place water evaporates to depart behind textures fashioned by the interaction of oil, water, air, brushwork, and substrate. The portray is translated right into a unfavourable and processed right into a cyanotype print, revealing what Waring refers to as “the alchemy of light and material transformation… In their making, artist and medium engage in a reciprocal dance – an exchange yielding artworks that are both earthly and mystical.”

Instagram: @vinwaring

Landscape ReEnvisioned was curated by Helaine Glick, an impartial curator and artwork author. She is a former Assistant Curator on the Monterey Museum of Art in Monterey, the place she curated a variety of exhibitions that includes works on paper, work, and images, plus the key images exhibitions, In Sharp Focus: The Legacy of Monterey Photography, and Bob Kolbrener—In Real Time. She served on the Board of Trustees on the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel and curated 4 exhibitions there. She has curated exhibitions for the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, the New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU), Los Gatos, the Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, and the Winfield Gallery in Carmel. She has additionally authored quite a few artist brochures, artist books, and exhibition catalog essays.

Landscape ReEnvisioned will probably be on view at Monterey Museum of Art although April 26, 2026. Visit the museum’s online artist gallery to be taught extra concerning the artists.

Instagram: @montereyart