Lalie Schewadron uses new and traditional media to create extraordinarily beautiful and unsettling ‘hybridized’ landscapes.

Photographs from the natural world – forests, ice or snow – are broken down into abstracted ‘building blocks.’ These building blocks – fragmented shapes which evoke the distant beginnings of life – are used to structure complex composite works, combining detailed opthalmic photographs, acrylic paint, drawings, and digital projections onto drawings and paintings.

The projected images, whose structures also originate in these abstracted ‘building blocks’ from nature, are themselves in a perpetual state of evolution, disintegration and flux: they are suggestive of natural organisms, but their evolution is randomly generated by computer software.



The resulting installations, created from numerous interacting media, pose questions about the infinite potential of scientific hybridization, and about the nature of reality and perception.

In creating hybridized entities with ‘lives’ of their own, Schewadron’s work functions as a metaphor for societal fears about the ultimate destruction of ‘nature’ as a meaningful and discrete category. It also dares to suggest the potential beauty in such destruction.