Art in Focus: John Goto’s “High Summer”

In his series High Summer (2000–2001), a portfolio of fifteen digital prints, the artist John Goto creates composite imaginary scenes where contemporary people disrupt the landscape gardens of eighteenth-century British country houses. These intrusive figures complicate the carefully contrived gardens with their seemingly natural planting and emblematic classical buildings. The integration of contemporary characters into historic landscape gardens encourages the viewer to think critically about nature and culture both past and present, and the politics of these gardens then and now.

This student-curated exhibition will explore the historical sites that Goto references in his photographs. Drawing on eighteenth-century views of the gardens at Stowe in Buckinghamshire and Stourhead in Wiltshire from the Center’s collection, Goto’s work will be contextualized to highlight the ways in which the landscapes have been created, adapted, and represented over time to serve particular and sometimes competing ideologies.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.