Kai Wasikowski’s work is occupied with the ideological aestheticisation of nature by confounding our understanding of it as a perceptual experience. His images of ubiquitous landscapes are often mediated by techniques like lenticular imagery or synthetic signifiers of an uncanny environment – a nature that is not really there. As we so often witness sublime natural landscapes from behind a screen these works make visible the cultural contingency and digital manipulation that construct our experiences of nature.

In his series, Foliage, 2015, Wasikowski uses lenticular photography to capture detailed images of leaves that shifts with the viewer as they move around the work. This series complicates the idea that nature exists because we see it, rather, objects in nature appear profoundly unknowable, occupying a state of infinite recess. This is further emphasised in Natural Artefact #1 and #2, 2017, which uses a technique of printing images of landscapes onto artificial leaves and placing them back into the scene. The resulting image disrupts the interface of the landscape and imagines nature as something mutable and readily manipulated by human creativity.

The hyper-reality of nature is embodied in an earlier series, Handscapes, 2014, which explores the relationship between the body and nature as mediated by technology. In Handscape II, the artist’s hand hangs, palm open onto which an image of a waterfall is projected. Underneath, lies a mound of sand and a small, toy dolphin. By using props that are signifiers of an island paradise, this work constructs a fantasy of an imagined landscape that is both placed and placeless at once. 

The coiled energy and formal restraint of Wasikowski’s In-Tension examines the way materials undermine the experience of encountering a natural phenomenon as it negotiates the tension between the real and the rendered. The work is composed of a line of fishing rods where the fishing line is looped between each rod, straining them into position. There is a sense of danger or foreboding in this work which threatens to snap at any moment. Unlike much of his work which explores the human desire for sensory immersion into a landscape, In-Tension acts more like a warning about the risk of disrupting the symbiotic balance of nature so precariously held into place.

What remains, beyond the conceptual sophistication and technical skill, is an idiosyncratic vision. The complex imagery and transformational gestures speak to a nature after nature, which implies an ending, but on the contrary, it engenders new ways of seeing.

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