| Homeland Security: Peter Edlund |
| | | |  | Peter EdlundHomeland Security: Near Camp Heart Mountain, Wyoming (After Ansel Adams), 2002Oil on canvas45 x 30 inches | | For the past 7 years Peter Edlund's landscape paintings address the contradiction between the utopian image of America and the actual social and political realities of the country. In his new series Homeland Security, Edlund has adopted Ansel Adams' iconic black and white images of the American West photographed at of near the sits of Japanese internment camps during world War II. For Edlund, Adams is the 20th century photographic equivalent of the 19th century Hudson River School painters who celebrated the American wilderness with little regard for what was actually taking place in the context of this environment. Edlund chose Ansel Adams' photographs because they helped to perpetuate the myth of magnificent , pristine landscape, ignoring any social commentary of what was happening amid this Western grandeur. For Edlund this series also emanates from events of September 11. 2001 and their fallout: the loss of civil liberties during wartime, racial profiling and the eagerness to retaliate. | |
