Brandon Bauer

This spring, my video work Anthropogenic Horizon will be featured in The American Landscape: Beyond the Horizon at the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) in West Bend, Wisconsin. This exhibition focuses on the American Landscape as the country marks its 250th anniversary. The exhibition draws from MOWA’s permanent collection alongside outside loans, weaving together more than two centuries of artists grappling with Wisconsin’s landscape and American identity.

“From Native voices and immigrant stories to contemporary reflections on place, this exhibition presents expansive views of life in Wisconsin.”— The American Landscape: Beyond the Horizon, MOWA Exhibition Text

I’m honored to have my work placed in dialogue with an extraordinary range of artists, from the Romantic 19th-century canvases of Henry Vianden, whose fading light and solitary trees echo Old World European landscape traditions, to the photographic and sculptural practices of contemporaries working across the full complexity of the Wisconsin experience.

About the Work

Anthropogenic Horizon reflects on the atomic origins of the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch defined by pervasive human impact on Earth’s systems. The work asks where, exactly, this new era begins: not at a single moment, but in the accumulation of decisions, materials, and half-lives written into the landscape beneath our feet. It is a meditation on the liminal space where geology becomes history, and history becomes something we must contend with and name to begin to understand our present condition and its future implications.

Guest curator Rafael Francisco Salas, a contemporary painter of American life and professor at Ripon College, whose own practice engages the spaces between memory and imagination. He has curated an exhibition that refuses easy nostalgia. Historic and contemporary works are set in genuine tension with one another. Agrarian traditions and the industries that reshaped them. The pastoral ideal and the contemporary reality of the Anthropocene pressing against it.

See the Exhibition

The American Landscape: Beyond the Horizon is on view at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, Wisconsin. The exhibition is guest-curated by Rafael Francisco Salas and features works by:

Emily Belknap, Siara Berry, Lois Bielefeld, Lila Greengrass Blackdeer, Mark Brautigam, John Stuart Curry, Joseph Friebert, Owen Gromme, Issac Harris, Asher Imtiaz, Lois Ireland, Tom Jones, Wilhelm Knapp, Helen Lonetree, Richard Lorenz, Truman Lowe, Walter Marsden, Shane McAdams, David Niec, Georgia O’Keeffe
Christian Olson, Robert von Neumann, Jason Reblando, Theodore Robinson, Suzanne Rose, Rafael Francisco Salas, Charles van Schaick, Bernhard Schneider, Wilhelm Schroeter, Paul Seifert, Trina May Smith, Adam Stoner, Howard Thomas, Charles Thwaite, Jason Vaughn, Henry Vianden, M. Winston, Santos Zingale.

The work has been drawn from MOWA’s permanent collection and beyond. I hope you’ll visit and spend some time with the range of artists whose work makes up this remarkable show!