In emotional landscapes, Angel Oloshove aims to express the transcendent beauty of Southwestern landscapes in meditative sculptural ceramics as varied as the sunsets and cloudscapes of her home state of Texas. A corpus of pastels on paper accompanies its characteristic biomorphic forms. Together, these works constitute his first solo exhibition at shape & design.

This new show debuts Angel OloshoveThe contemporary creative process of – which draws on his pattern-making technique informed by his experience as a toy developer and designer – through works conceived as explorations of humanity’s varied emotional responses to landscapes natural.

One of many scenic exhibitions for the artist, emotional landscapes serves as a summary of his latest study of the romantic idea of ​​the sublime, the aesthetic beauty beyond explanation or measure that is both breathtaking and terrifying. In what might be called a revival of 19th century Romanticism, Oloshove hopes to celebrate nature’s ability to inspire genuine emotion in his works. Inspired by natural phenomena, her cloud-like sculptures and airy pastels can serve as material distillations of subjective experience and symbolic bridges between ineffability and mortality.

But Oloshove aims to remain critical of sentimentality in his work, as the idealization of natural phenomena can diminish, and perhaps destroy, the unspeakable quality of majestic spaces that elicit human emotion. Colloquially known as the “Land of Enchantment” in the tourism industry, New Mexico itself can be seen as a romanticized state that typifies the moral and ethical issues surrounding the commodification of natural landscapes that emotional landscapes seeks to address.

The intended tension between aesthetic purity and syrupy, commercial sentimentality is best captured by the exhibition’s use of railroad ties as plinths for artwork. The installation presents the artist’s dreamlike works based on raw and utilitarian forms – a textural representation of two incongruous schools of thought, romanticism and industrialism. At the center of the ideological conflict between art and industry that the exhibition attempts to unveil are the functional ceramics of Oloshove, works that hope to satisfy the universal need for utility and beauty.

emotional landscapes is on view from June 30 to August 20 at form & concept in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

For more information, visit formandconcept.center.