In Hitched to Everything Else, Lillian Bayley Hoover depicts spaces where human infrastructure interrupts or collides with the natural environment. The artist highlights and challenges humans’ conflicted relationship to nature, or, as she explains it, all the ways “we are of nature but proceed as if we are apart from it.” Hoover’s complex landscapes invite viewers to confront this untenable approach, pointing to the threat it poses both to our own existence and to the natural world we treat as if it is distinct from human life.

The paintings in Hitched to Everything Else are shaped by absence and concealment. Sections of the scenes are covered over, removed, or otherwise obscured, creating rifts and layers. This technique reflects Hoover’s interest in the dynamic nature of our attention to the landscape and the ways that attention is mediated by everyday activity, infrastructure, personal experience, and even the genre of landscape painting itself. Hoover challenges viewers to navigate this visual complexity rather than becoming absorbed in a single, uninterrupted scene, as they might expect from conventional depictions of the landscape.

The exhibition’s title is borrowed from My First Summer in the Sierra by naturalist John Muir. Writing about his two years living in Yosemite, Muir observed: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Hoover’s use of Muir’s quote reflects the artist’s own interest in time–the relatively short time of human generations and the deep time of the earth’s environment. As Hoover explains, landscape is both “an active living participant in the events of our time, as well as a record of time itself.” The rifts, layers, varied styles, and shifting perspectives in Hoover’s work invite us to consider the landscape as a growing, changing amalgamation of living beings and systems, rather than simply a static background to human existence. They also point to the dire consequences of failing to consider the environment, and our own role within it, in its full complexity.