OCMA (Orange County Museum of Art)

This exhibition of photographic works from OCMA’s permanent collection is inspired by a series of photographs by Lewis Baltz, The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California, 1974 in which the landscape photograph is not an idealized image, but rather as an unromantic documentation of the world around us. A central thread moving through Forsaken Utopias is a perspective of the western American landscape that leaves behind the utopic idea of a vast frontier of beauty and resources ripe with potential for freedom, growth, and empowerment. The artists in this exhibition depict the landscape in ways that engage our more complex emotional relationship to it. For many of them, the western landscape is an abandoned, empty place that brings forth unbridled feelings of sadness and loneliness.