Will (April) Neuhaus is a contemporary land collaborative artist living and working in the Southern Alberta Rockies. Originally from Cammeraygal and Ngarigo Countries in modern Australia, their work leverages her lived experience exploring and living in the bush to interrogate land classification as a form of containment and control. Through the use of foraged materials and human – land dialogue, Neuhaus’s work attempts a split from traditional Western visualizations of the land as a space of conquest, to a place where the land is seen as a collaborative force.
True wilderness – i.e., a space completely devoid of human influence – is an impossibility in our contemporary Anthropocene, so what does it mean to classify land as wild? By intentionally avoiding representations of the ‘grand vista,’ Neuhaus evades the fallacy of the romantic landscape, wherein artists attempt to contain the outdoors into a small rectangular frame. The frame, much like the farm fence, contains the wild into a space beyond. By creating work alongside these physical and surveyed boundaries Neuhaus’s work attempts to explore how classifications such as wildland and wilderness act to contain the land as somewhere within the periphery.
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