In her series Terra Incognita, Grand Rapids, Michigan photographic artist Jennifer Steensma Hoag has wandered with her camera into abandoned construction and military sites in the western U.S. What results is a sort of voyeurism into one of man's greatest foibles - being unable to complete what he begins. The resulting landscapes are reminiscent of a sort of post-industrial coitus interruptus - a landscape littered with monuments to incompletion and abandonment.

Among these monolithic false starts are a doorway which leads beneath a mound of soil, a sculptural pyramid standing sentinel as a sign for visitors from other worlds, dry, infertile ground which is furrowed, as if prepared to receive mammoth seeds that will never arrive, and the poly-vinly-chloride skin of a snake of Amazonian
proportion who has slithered away in search of more verdant land. Further on our journey through the wasteland left in man's wake, stands a cast concrete colossus - a monument to his folly, and a road that stops abruptly, never to continue toward a destination which has long been forgotten. In another desolate image, probably the most land-art-like of the series, a lone cloud floats above a single abandoned beam in a tribute to minimalism.

Man's ego is Promethean, and his inhumanity to man pales in
comparison to his callous ravishment of the earth. In Steensma Hoag's world, an eerie, almost zen-like silence prevails in the absence of a soundtrack comprised of the grinding of heavy machinery. Man has gone, indifferent to what he began and abandoned, and all that remains are figments of illusory triumph, beneath impossibly blue skies of vanished idealism.

Closer to home, Chicago artist Ryan Zoghlin, fascinated by the strangeness of nuclear landscapes, has created his own post industrial vistas in a land of peculiar proportions where imaginary wares are mass-produced throughout the depth of night. Zoghlin's landscapes are nocturnal, well lit by unknown sources, and clearly productive, although we have no idea what the end products might be. These are industries of the imagination, existing in the scenery of creativity. In lieu of standard cement block, mortar and heavy timber, Zoghlin has constructed his factories of wire screening, condensers, ball jars and perforated metal sheets, and set them in motion with smokestacks spewing cotton wool steam. The resulting scenes are eerily realistic and strangely poignant. It is said that truth is stranger than fiction - which could easily be reversed in the case of these nightscapes where fictitious factories churn out invisible, unknown goods. Zoghlin imagines their functions, and invites us to do likewise, teasing us with the amusing inventions of his more fanciful thoughts.

Earth, air, and water artist Roy Staab, who resides in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin when he is not in Cape Cod, Japan, Finland or other far flung corners of the globe creating exquisite installation pieces along the shores of ponds, lakes and oceans, or on the banks of rivers. Staab, who is becoming known worldwide for the ethereal, ephemeral quality of his meditative pieces, has created this installation specifically for this exhibit, although his work is usually made out- doors. Staab begins by becoming intimate the land - and coming to an understanding with its water and indigenous materials. When he has a sense of the space and those things growing in the vicinity, he binds, braids, or weaves the reeds, sticks, or stalks of plants into lovely, zen-like geometries. Staab uses no tools other than his hands, and often stands knee to waist deep in water for hours and even days on end to create a piece that can be destroyed within moments by a sudden storm. It is the temporal that interests Staab, as well as the immediacy of the materials and the meditation of the actual work. The brief marriage of air, water and light is the defining factor in Staab's pieces, and their fleeting lives are their raison dâ'etre.

Sharyl Noday, who spent most of her life in California, and now
calls Chicago home, is not your average documentarian. In fact, most of Noday's usual work is completely conceptual. What would provoke such an artist to meticulously record the mysterious crop circles of Britain? The answer is fairly simple - the paranormal nature ascribed to the formations was all it took to entice Noday away from her standard fare, and into the affected fields for a closer look. For those viewers unfamiliar with the fascinating phenomenon, the video will intrigue, but unfortunately does not promise any concrete answers, for there are none. In these images, Noday has given us the richness of texture that black and white film is so capable of in the right hands. She has abstracted the directional falling of the grain into powerful compositions that ask more questions than they are able to answer,
creating an urge to seek out any possible explanations, even if it means staying vigilantly awake all night in a field awaiting the creation of yet another formation and therefore adding to an already obsessive
conundrum.

Alec Jeser, who lives in Reynes, France, has altered the landscape by the addition of what seems to be beams of light, and is, in reality, a series of massive glass slabs, placed into the earth in places where they both blend with and disturb the scenery. The sky seldom looks the same in any two directions, and the variations between one horizon and another are reflected and delicately color the glass in a variety of tender hues. The transparent nature of glass is precisely what allows it to exist in the rural and mountainous scenes of France without seeming out of place. They are subtle intrusions which fade in and out in a game of now you see it - now you don't - leaving the viewer uncertain whether there is actually something there.

Ann Ginsburg Hofkin, a landscape photographer from Minnesota, uses infrared film to give many of her images a sort of Luncheon sensibility - slightly off-kilter, somewhat amiss and overtly mysterious. Ginsburg Hofkin's landscapes are large - monumental hillsides and far-reaching fields - the skys are vast and wide. In one image, tangled branches frame a lone cactus, and in another, a seemingly innocent field of dandelion puffs, waiting to have wishes made on them, leads to a small, forbidding, abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. In yet another, a series of round paving stones forms a path that stretches on ad infinitum, with no end in sight, and in another, memorial flowers rise up out of a hillside cemetery like strange dwarf trees. There is something - call it a feeling if you will, a low hum, a slight frisson up the back of your neck - something is not quite right in these scenes. Ginsburg Hofkin's large scale color prints show that she knows how to capture the scene, but it is these black and white images that show her true gift - taking something that is perfectly right, and somehow giving it a cast of not being right at all.