Athena LaTocha

Athena LaTocha says, “Having grown up in Alaska, my understanding of the land was influenced by both the rugged monumentality of the terrain and the impact of the oil and gas industry upon the land. To this day, I feel a natural affinity for places and things that evoke those memories, such as the mountains and deserts of the southwest and excavation sites and earth-moving equipment found in the industrial landscape." The scale of her work envelops the viewer. She says, "in the aboriginal sense one is actively moving through the landscape. Humans are part of the landscape, not separate from it."

The palettes of her work, at first glance, might resemble the paintings of J.W. Turner or of the Hudson River school. Whereas these 19th century artists might view the landscape as an empty canvas for humans to act upon, LaTocha believes the land not only to be a geographic space, a repository for history, but a personified living entity. "All of my work is about being immersed in these spaces, these environments. Sometimes I'm reluctant to use the word 'landscape' because there's a certain kind of genre, a certain kind of concept or ideology when you think about the idea of landscape. It connotes a kind of reverence or allusion to something. It's usually something that you're looking at or looking upon. It's this view or window into another world, a natural world or an industrial one."