I choose to see the beauty
2020
Moving image and sound
0:59
Part of the
mixed-media installation Grasses

Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world.
The disarray. I choose to see the beauty.
To believe there is an order to our days, a purpose.

Westworld  (TV Series)

I miss nature. 

The experience that comes from being in contact with nature has fed many of my works throughout the years.

During the quarantine, not being able to wander outdoors, I started to substitute at home these encounters with real nature taking pictures of those virtual landscapes from television series, documentaries, photographs, and movies, the same way I capture moments in my travels to treasure the memories of those places and lived experiences. I then created evocative collages after those images of meadows and fields in different color palettes according to each climatic region.

Grasses is a mix-media installation that creates a dialogue between two fictional forms of nature. The collages hanging on the walls and filling the ambiance as real plants would establish a contrasting relationship between my work on paper and the images on the digital screens in front of them, conveying the feeling of freedom that usually comes from being in a wildflower field.

Usually set as backgrounds, these hills covered in grasses exist in real places far from where I live. Some of the still images from those vast landscapes included a closed caption at the moment of taking the picture, enhancing the ephemeral sensation of actually being there. 

Then there are also fictional universes with sublime landscapes like the ones in Westworld, where the main character chooses “to see beauty” in the world –just as I do– instead of the disarray. 

Patricia Van Dalen, June 2020