Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes is an exploration of how we experience landscape in a time of technological influence and environmental change. Lin, who examines how our current relationship to landscape is extended, condensed, distorted and interpreted via new technologies, translates these systematized spaces into objects and environments that can be engaged physically. As satellite photography, sonar scanning and digital mappings have rebuilt our natural world within virtual space, Lin makes it her project to transpose these new landscapes back into the physical realm.

At the core of this exhibition are three monumental installations that create distinct “geologic” encounters, each working to engage our physical, psychological, and intellectual experience of the environment around us. As we traverse Lin’s landscapes—moving around, under, and through them—we encounter a world that has been mapped, digitized, analyzed and then reintroduced by Lin as actual, physical structures. Her work blends a typology of natural forms, from rivers to mountains to seas, with a language of scientific analysis represented by grids, models, and maps. In doing so, Lin merges our experience of the ideal and the real, as well as our encounter with the conceptual, sculptural, and the architectural model.

Systematic Landscapes is organized by The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington in Seattle and curated by Richard Andrews, Director.