the other landscape 02, 2010 by Laura Garcia Serventi

Memorial Day weekend is upon us. While some of us will duly fire up the grill, open a couple of cold beers and enjoy a warm and lazy weekend at home, there is no doubt that many Americans will spend the holiday in the great outdoors, welcoming summer by enjoying and celebrating the beauty of nature—likely many people in the northern hemisphere will be doing the same in the coming months. Contender Laura Garcia Serventi's images of seemingly stunning landscapes, then, will give us all something to look forward to while heading out the door.

the other landscape 03, 2010 by Laura Garcia Serventi

From afar, the images in this series look like they were taken at different national parks. As the eerily beautiful images draw you in, however, a painterly quality presents itself, making you second-guess whether they are actually photographs. Well, paintings they are not. Serventi's the other landscape series was shot entirely at various Museums of Natural History, with each image showing just one small detail from a diorama. The confusion these images cause is precisely what Serventi is going after:

My work develops around the theatricality of the photographic medium, its relationship between truth and simulation and the concept of "mise en scène." My images are often created from this oscillation and develops around the concepts of "the natural" against "the artificial," "the real" against "the fake," and the ambiguous relationship that exists between them. The natural world is always present; sometimes it's the center of the image, sometimes it's just a backdrop, but it's always a nature that has been appropriated in some way. It's a nature at human scale, never wild, always under control, harmless. Whether it's a painted representation, or a diorama, or a collage made out of photographs taken at a botanical garden, there's always the intrusion of a human hand and the intention of creating an illusion. The landscape becomes a scenography and the photograph translates into a mise-en-scène. Contrary to the Romantic conception of nature, this natural universe has been intervened [with] and altered to human scale, [has] become submissive and completely still.

the other landscape 04, 2010 by Laura Garcia Serventi

Serventi was in fact trained in painting in her native Argentina, before discovering her love for photography and moving to Italy to study it. Now calling New York home, Serventi's work ranges from traditional photography to paper and tridimensional collage.