What the Landscape Holds

What the Landscape Holds is an interactive exhibition that invites visitors to step directly into constructed environments shaped by synthetic materials and technology. Drawing from lived experience, play, and material experimentation, artists Jason Bennett (The Bahamas) and David Gumbs (Saint Martin/Martinique) transform everyday materials into landscapes that can be touched, moved through, and activated by the viewer.

The exhibition presents environments formed by cardboard, wood, plastic, and technological elements—materials that carry associations with shelter, comfort, and survival while also introducing new forms of dependence and environmental strain. Much of Gumbs’s work examines constructed landscapes shaped by human intervention, blurring the boundary between the natural and the artificial to reflect worlds where innovation and excess coexist. Bennett’s practice emphasises processes of extraction and construction, drawing on his background in construction to work with materials such as wood and cement bags that hold particular resonance in a post-Dorian Bahamas.

This exhibition unfolds through participation. As visitors navigate the space, their presence becomes part of the work, highlighting how human choices, systems, and materials continuously alter the environments we inhabit. Structures that suggest shelter, utility, or progress also reveal their capacity to confine, disrupt, or reshape behaviour, prompting consideration of how the landscapes we create begin to shape us in return.

What the Landscape Holds is curated by Richardo Barrett.