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The pollutant/landscape series are drawings of the molecular structure of the environmental pollutants ethane, methane, propane, hexane, benzene, and acrolein. With the exception of blow up 75, which is based on Van Ruisdael’s Landscape with a Dead Tree, these compositions are based on Hudson River School landscapes. This school of painting emphasized a reverence and idealization of nature and the landscape. To me, they convey the same kind of religiosity and spirituality of the straightforwardly religious paintings on which the Immaculate Conception/Asexual Reproduction series is based.
They were not just about the land, but a meditation on god, nature, country – the land as a path to the sublime. That is placed in contrast to and made up of images of the molecular structure of environmental pollutants. It is an aspect of the physical reality of the situation as well as a form of dystopia to the original’s utopia.