One of the 39 images in "Representative Locations: Six American Landscapes" shows a site called Dick and Jane's Spot, a cheerfully kitschy roadside attraction in Ellensburg, Wash. Dominating the photograph is a big sign asking, "What Is This Place?" That message dominates the show, too.
"Representative Locations," which runs through March 19 at the President's Gallery at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, is drawn from the holdings of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a Southern California-based research institute that looks at issues relating to planning and landscape. Founded in 1994, the center has a photographic archive of more than 100,000 images.
The pictures are mostly of the West, which makes sense: Land there is less developed, and thus land-use issues more open to debate (and possibility). The photographs are 20-by-13 inches, all in bright postcard colors. Lacking frames and mattes, the pictures look like windows pounded through the white plaster walls. That sense of blunt visual utility is underscored by the absence of dates or photographer credits on the labels. The pictures are meant to document rather than flatter or indict.
Land use is more often thought of as a subject for action - or inaction - than interpretation. Yet there are nearly as many ways of looking at a piece of land as there are people looking at it. Where we are so often determines who we are, and vice versa. In identity, no less than in real estate, it's location, location, and location. And note that in the show's title it is "location," not place - and rightfully so. A place is concrete and specific as a location, something abstract, is not.
We don't just create these landscapes. We define and conceptualize them, too. Only God can make a tree, or the land it's rooted in. But it's humans who decide what to do with it and how to classify it. That's why so many of the images could fit into several of the six categories the show is divided into. It's also the point of the nonce-word names given to those categories.
"Safetyscape" shows things like a fire science academy in California. "Artscape" is environmental art, broadly construed, running the gamut from "Robert Morris' Reclaimed Gravel Pit" to Dick and Jane's handiwork. "Warscape" offers the military at work and play. A bank vault once used for a nuclear test in Nevada has strands of rebar sticking out of one wall - the blast side, surely - that resemble burnt frozen spaghetti. "Navy Target #78, Glamis, California" looks like a candidate for Artscape - it could be a distant cousin of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty." Has anyone ever considered moving the National Endowment for the Arts to the Pentagon? It could do wonders for the image of both - let alone their funding.
"Moviescape" consists of sets and the like (remember that mock-up of the Exxon Valdez in "Waterworld"?). "Industryscape" speaks for itself. Best of all is "Cartoscape": cartography made manifest. The name sounds like Can't Escape, doesn't it? And we can't escape that very human impulse to superimpose concepts and classifications on the world around us, whether that world is natural, man-made, or both. Cartoscape includes a picture of the Four Corners Monument, a trench marking the US-Canada border in Washington, and a border fence in San Diego County that extends out beyond the surf (somewhere King Canute is smiling).
The pictures are interesting enough without labels. You don't need to know anything about "Equipment & Facilities," from Bethlehem, Pa., for example, to see how shabby the industrial sublime can get while still retaining some measure of sublimity. But with the textual information added in the pictures become something much more: a goad to reimagining how we think about the ground beneath our feet and the structures we put on it.
The President's Gallery is on the 11th floor of the MassArt Tower Building, which has large windows affording a sweeping view of the cityscape to the north, east, and southeast. It serves, in effect, as the 40th image in the show - and an implicit reminder that representative locations are all around anyone who has eyes to see them.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
