In her most recent body of work, painter Virginia Yount has combined images of the American landscape with man-made structures or fixtures, creating a dialogue between the organic and the synthetic. A Virginia native and a newcomer to Texas, Yount takes inspiration from diverse aspects of the Texas landscape, such as the hills, deserts, greenbelts, and natural caverns. An avid camper, Yount claims that she has become more interested in not only the surprising features of the Texan terrain (“Look! Another natural spring!”), but also with the architectural structures that humans have imposed on the land in order to best enjoy it.

In her untitled painting in the Making It Alone exhibition, which Yount saw as the most recent culmination of her experimentation with landscape views, the artist has created a work that imparts a vaguely sinister feel to it. As a backdrop, she painted a glowing and peaceful view of Southwestern hills. On the right side of the image, she has created a fanciful and geometric residence/lookout tower in bright greens and oranges. The architecture is angular and coolly minimal in contrast to the warm landscape scene over which the tower looks. The structure seems environmentally friendly, yet its appearance is quite out of sync with the prevailing landscape.

According to Yount, she envisioned the owners and creators of this modern vessel as wealthy nature lovers with a penchant for soft science. Thus, she placed several objects that appear to be scientific instruments at the top level of the observation pod. In the foreground of the painting, however, we see a further manifestation of the owners’ interest in science. In a round pit in the ground lies a group of human bones reminiscent of a burial ground. What are the owners doing with such a pit? And, what kinds of mystical powers are they tapping into with such an exploration?

This is not the first painting in her oeuvre in which she has created a humorous dialogue among the wild world, technology, and somewhat supernatural forces. In a smaller untitled work, Yount filled a lush green landscape with boulders and Stonehenge-esque dolmens. Under the main structure, she has placed what appears to be a marble or stone cult statue, again recalling Druidic ritual. However, she has also painted speaker wires that stretch from the statue out to stacks of sound speakers in other areas of the environment. A viewer can only imagine how the modern convenience of speakers may have eased the labor of whatever seemingly spiritual ritual or event took place at this spot. Yount says that, with this painting, she imagined religion as a kind of shelter and the sound coming from the speakers as the gravelly radio sound of people talking from far away. Here, like the Jumbotrons found in many larger Christian churches, the collision of old-time religion and new-fashioned technology strikes a viewer as bizarrely ironic.

Although Yount’s paintings do not necessarily have narrative aspects, the absence of human figures makes them that much more imaginative for the viewer, who can only guess at what kind of person would create such unnatural looking tableaux or buildings in the middle of the country. One also cannot help but wonder how these rural living spaces have evolved to have such an insistence on modern ambiance and convenience when located in the middle of nowhere. In these works, the colorful utilitarian aspects of the buildings recall the geodesic domes that Buckminster Fuller espoused as the ultimate sustainable living spaces in the 1960s and that still dot the northern California landscape. In the end, it is up to each viewer to determine whether they find these structures flagrantly disrespectful of the land or a full-on admission that any man-made structure can never be fully integrated with nature.