Landscape (of all landscapes)

Product of a residency and collaboration with the Minnesota Museum of American Art (The M), conducted in their master storage space and with their old low-fi digital collections database exploring their landscapes and other natural-related work. This project extended other work I’ve done about the bureaucracy, management and distance of modern nature—in this instance through the site of the museum and landscape paintings—and the underlying desire and longing for a place in it. More on these ideas and the residency in this interview and this lyric essay.

Here, the “landscape (of all landscapes)” is a purported lost/found item in the museum’s storage space and database, Past Perfect. It is an unfathomably large and sublime artwork described in detail in the database record entry which is screencapped in the physical booklet of this project. The entry is also made available digitally, along with the only images of the artwork, on the CDROM, which is missing. The project culminated in an installation later acquired by the M, completing an absurd, thematically on-point closed circle: the purchase of a piece of conceptual lit/art about a non-existent fabulous landscape painting lost in the depths of their collection. But its record entry truly exists in the database, created and entered by me during the course of the residency.

Installation

ARTWORK FEATURE: LANDSCAPE (OF ALL LANDSCAPES)

PASSING ON A SPECIAL WORK OF ART

FROM OUR DATABASE

HANDLER MOHEB SOLIMAN

FOR MUSEUMS PATRONS

& ARTISTS ALIKE

“This CD-ROM includes merge-ready records of Landscape (of all landscapes) as well as images, scanned files and media add-ons, providing a rare opportunity for our clients’ clientele to take home an extraordinary piece of art, history, culture or nature as is—compromised, but prized. Such are the times.

So enjoy a private encounter with an object that may never again see the light of day and display yet all the same lives on as much sheltered as removed through digitization, always in reach if we can but remember where we stood it.

But remember, the database is not the collection, and the collection is not art. As a landscape is not the landscape, and landscapes are not nature but distant vistas upon.”

*ITEMS ARE AS IS—ARTWORK CAPTURED IN RECORD—RECORD FABRICATED BY HANDLER*