<p "="">It’s been a long time since we’ve needed to leave our homes to explore the world. Longer still since ‘Explorer’ has been a valid occupation. We’ve mapped the Earth down to its dirt. The internet is our vessel now. We can ‘go’ anywhere, ‘see’ anyplace. For travels through American landscapes, we’ve swapped the once-required horse-driven wagon and months of dangerous journey for a few keystrokes on our computers; a flick of the wrist, really.
In order to voyage through Brea Souders’ Vistas, we must first understand how her pictures were made. The artist culls anonymous shadow selfies from 360-degree photographs of U.S. national parks found on Google. The image-stitching algorithms, as magnificent a technology as they are, have difficulty in knowing how to handle the shadows left on the ground by camera operators, leaving fragmented artifacts of human presence amid their techno-mediated views of the natural world. Souders takes these views, prints them, and applies watercolors to form resemblances of hand-colored travel postcards of an older time.
