Land Valuation: Luke Watson

From the luscious panoramic landscapes of the Hudson River School to Maynard Dixon’s seemingly endless cloud filled skies set behind painted mesas to Grant Wood’s overly saturated and stylized pastoral scenes of the Midwest, American painters have long shaped a romantic vision of the land. These images helped construct a narrative of the United States as expansive, untouched, and waiting to be explored. This myth has further been perpetuated by tourism imagery, National Park postcards, and idealized and sometimes altered travel photography. Yet the land has always borne evidence of habitation, use, and intervention. This tension between the idealized landscape and the lived landscape raises ongoing questions about perception versus reality, and what it means to love, occupy, or lay claim to the land.

For Land Valuation, Phoenix-based artist, Luke Watson, reframes the conversation around the American landscape by centering the human experience. Within the exhibition, Watson creates macro and micro encounters with nature from atv tire tracks set in front of looming mesas to a birdwatcher standing in a parking lot to an intimate rendering of an endangered bird. By foregrounding ordinary interactions with the outdoors, Watson challenges the expectation that nature must appear untouched to be meaningful. His work invites viewers to reconsider how land is valued—as scenery, resource, recreation site, habitat, or cultural inheritance. Rather than presenting answers, Watson opens space for reflection: Who gets to define what nature is? What constitutes a “nature lover”? And how do our everyday choices, movements, and pleasures shape the landscapes we claim to admire? These questions form a more contemporary discussion around our value system around land and expose inherent biases we all have around the use of nature.

Opening Reception

Friday, January 23, 2026 6-8 pm