Relic of Landscape (2006-2009)
The Relic of Landscape series developed from a need to understand Rust Belt America, using landscape painting genre as a historical and social launching point. Michelle Muldrow began the series Relic of Landscape , following her relocation from San Francisco, California to Cleveland, Ohio. This landscape abruptly challenged her with its Rust Belt allure and faded grandeur, a sumptuous seduction, while it contrasted with the stark reality of a region in chronic economic decline. Surrounded by ruin and relics of a golden industrial past now long gone, Muldrow found herself in a place burdened by its own history.
Confounded by the desire to paint these ruins, Muldrow sought to understand how this exquisite and once thriving region declined so dramatically. Adopting the compositional strictures of the aesthetic movement, the Picturesque, and utilizing the theories of William Gilpin and Claude Lorrain, Muldrow applied them to contemporary Cleveland landscapes.
Muldrow conversed within the confines of the Picturesque, as a historical departure point, Presenting decaying factories and overgrown brownfields as “ruin”, Muldrow embraced the impulse to romanticize “ruin,” using its aesthetic format as a seductive tool and also as a social commentary. The juxtaposition of the arbitrary aesthetic rules of the Picturesque against the stagnant and looming shadows of these old industries mirrored the frustrations of the Rust Bet,using an outdated lens to paint a region,desperately holding on to its older industries and value system, crushed by its own burden of history.
