John Goto
High
Summer is set in a modern Dyscadia, and looks at our troubled
contemporary relationship to the countryside. Modern tourists
are seen enjoying recreational, cultural and heritage activities
and only careful inspection begins to reveal the frictions within
the 'peoples park' of modern Britain.
The neoclassical settings are based on the landscape
gardens at Stowe, Rousham and Stourhead, where ideas encountered
on the Grand Tour were realised in the mid-eighteenth century
in the domestic context of the English country estate. Goto
reforms these 'polite landscapes' to convey some of the sense
of space and scale apparent in the paintings of Claude Lorrain,
which had influenced the architects of the original gardens;
Vanbrugh, Bridgeman, Kent, Brown and Hoare.
View the series at : www.johngoto.org.uk/summer/index.htm
