SURFACE AREA at Finale Art File










Land is measured by geometry. Surface Area is one of such units to measure it by, being the total area of an object's surface, including its sloping and curving and furrowing features. Almost all surface is land, or if not, are pictures of it - landscape, dioramas, scenography, photography, tableau - differentiated only by medium, geographical features, lighting, color, vegetation, metaphorical allusion. What to make of images then? But an area of interpretation characterized by its surface value, as to its meaning, as to what it purports to convey.

All pictures are virtually landscapes. They are geographic bodies of the imagination formed in hue, in valleys and peaks of shadow and light, where terrain unfurls in the gestural articulation of its medium. Flatness. Density. Surface and ground. The whole in parts, the parts in configurable portions. Of fullness and void. Window views, aerial views, stereo views. A kingdom, a city, a province, a world, a universe begotten from all ideations of territorial dominion. Ideology in plasticity.

—Lena Cobangbang