I still remember the
particular moment about ten years ago when I was driving around the US Southwest
with my two best friends. Leah rode shotgun as usual, and was in charge of the
maps, while Jan (she called herself the librarian) read from the dozen or so
guide books we had in the back seat. Monument Valley, while impressive, was also
kind of disappointing because, well, we’d already seen the mesas so many times
before on TV. Then, driving north on US 163 for fifteen minutes or so, we came
upon a dot on the map called Mexican Hat, a huge flat rock over sixty feet in
diameter, perched precariously off-centre on a narrow column of stone. We looked
way up, amazed, and that’s when I realized it: the cartoon landscapes of the
Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner show are real.

Long before the industrial
revolution, before William Morris’ grave concerns about mechanical labour,
before Ma and Engels, before Metropolis and 2001: A Space Odyssey, even before
McLuhan’s theory of media as an extension of our senses, and well before
Baudrillard pronounced us as mere terms on the termini of the simulacra, there
were fears that technology would dominate us, even replace us.

But we are
now post atom bomb, post late capitalism, post digital revolution, post panic
about the post-modern world. We live in the midst of it, entrenched and deeply
affected by a world only imagined by those Orwellian anxieties of a future that
is now our present. Were all their misgivings simply Luddite reactions to our
progression into this brave new world order? Perhaps our layers of irony are so
thick that we cannot hear their anxious echoes through the technological flotsam
and jetsam of CNN, the Internet, and cable TV. Or are we just too cynical, too
colonized to embrace the beauty of this complicated world we have designed for
ourselves?

Not so, say these artists. As alienated as we may be from the
pre-industrial landscape, picaresque views can still be found. Undoubtedly,
media and technology have entered our lives like a pair of slippers that
insulate our feet from cold tiles and the static of synthetic carpet simply
there and overlooked as we putter about our daily lives. But every once in a
while we gaze down at that slipper and ponder it: oh cheap slipper, what do you
tell me about my life?

Such questions may seem absurd amid the larger
concerns that occupy our minds (environmental degradation, economic
globalization, cultural imperialism, feeding the cat) but they are no less a
part of our contemporary landscape. Why not let our pre-fab day-glow prosthetics
embrace us, and ask what can be gleaned from such a lowly and intimate place as
the bottom of our feet or the tip of the remote control. TV dinner with
landscape presents us with a certain glance upon our world, one with which we
are familiar, but at the same time often take for granted.

Curated by Kym Pruesse + Scott Sorli