Unless you’re kidding yourself, all landscape photography is now a horror show. It’s soaked in death and each image is a memento mori that includes us all – not just “you will die”, but “we’re all going to die”. There is nothing great about the outdoors. Nature no longer exceeds us petty humans, belittling us while at the same time opening up an immensity that we can share in, because we’ve effectively killed it (or, at least, we’re steps from striking a deathblow unless something radical, unforeseen, and uncharacteristic happens in Paris this week). We made nature so. We also made it unbeautiful, because any instance of it is now subject to the threat of ruination, any attempt to idealize it is guilty of nostalgia, any attempt to regain its prelapsarian innocence is at best naïve and at worst misleading us about its rampant destruction. 
John Wyatt, Fault Line X, from the series Fault Line, 205, silver gelatin print on resin-coated paper
With these happy thoughts in mind I wandered among the tree-strewn photographs on view at Circuit Gallery, the once nomadic commercial gallery that has shared a space with Prefix ICA at 401 Richmond since 2014. The three contributing artists – Eamon MacMahon, John Wyatt, and Chris Bennett– all turn their lenses to nature and suffuse it with a sense of dread. Wyatt's murky portraits of invasive vines suffocating large swaths of tropical forest are ripe with metaphorical potential. The gothic underpinnings of his (as well as the other two’s) work exudes a repressed return with terrifying consequences. Shot in twilight and printed with silver gelatin, the photographs appear from a distance to be minimalist charcoal paintings and up close resemble ancient stonework. An obdurate silence is the defining quality throughout. Bennett's dark forest scenes are, in contrast, almost lighthearted, but they too express an alienation from nature that cities were built to keep at bay. The fear of woods has long been a reminder of how we are visitors, not masters, of certain places on the planet. 
Eamon MacMahon, Yukon Woods, 2009, archival pigment print
The same misapprehension is experienced from a different angle with Eamon MacMahon's God's eye views of our northern dominion, giving us a falsely transcendental perspective on all that we've damaged. The clusters of tiny trees in an Alberta valley look like hair follicles on a scalp halfway through the devastation of male pattern baldness. And three dots on a frozen barrens are the only signs of non-vegetative life in the entire gallery. If that makes the exhibition sound like a big bummer, it is and it isn't. The terror and beauty of nature used to threaten to destroy our selves; now we are the destroyers and nature is at risk, but terror and beauty remain.
Circuit Gallery: http://www.circuitgallery.com/
Apprehensions continues until December 19.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Apprehensions at Circuit Gallery, Toronto
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