Flight Patterns explored the history and tradition of modern landscape representation in the white settler nations of the Pacific Rim, with photographs, films, videos, and paintings by twenty-three contemporary artists based in southern California, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The exhibition examines a new generation of artists influenced by the “New Topographics” movement of the 1970s, an enterprise typified by photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Adams, and Lewis Baltz. The earliest works in the exhibition, by Paul Outerbridge, predated this movement but anticipated the new generation’s focus on the sociopolitical undercurrents of modern landscapes.
Artists included John Outerbridge, Anthony Hernandez, Allan Sekula, Miles Coolidge, Christina Fernandez, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Roy Kiyooka, Simon Leung, Simryn Gill, Gavin Hipkins, Rodney Graham, Rachel Khedoori, Yuk King Tan, David Lamelas, Zacharias Kunuk and Igloolik Isuma Productions, Tracey Moffatt, Michael Parekowhai, Glen Wilson, Tim Johnson, Lee Mullican, Caryl Davis, and Doug Aitken.
Flight Patterns is organized by Connie Butler, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.