“You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.” - Walter Lippmann

When Artist Portia Mortensen is not out in nature taking care of her horses and tending to her land, she is in her well-lit studio diligently applying acrylic to canvas; her shelves stacked high with her paintings. The desk at which she works looks out a long bay window, offering her a verdant view of her rural Pennsylvania home. She watches as the rapid expansion of industry and technology engulfs her lush views in the name of progress and convenience. Mortensen draws heavily from her lived experience to create vivid landscape paintings and produces her gorgeous, inimitable style.

In this show, Satiating the Machine, Mortensen explores the intersection of culture, technology, and the environment. Her work is especially poignant today with the recent rapid development of Artificial Intelligence and its harmful effects on the environment. AI data farms require copious and inefficient amounts of energy and water to cool them. Mortensen describes this as “feeding machines above people,” and takes issue with the unsustainable practice. Culture Clash 1, acrylic and oil on canvas, 24x36 in, is a meditation on her environmental concerns. In an impressive display of technique and color, the artist creates a dialogue between converging aspects of daily life by juxtaposing landscapes with technicolor geometric patterns. The vista seems as if it is being encroached upon by the geometric forms, a fading twilight slowly swallowed by an unnatural darkness and pushed aside to make way for uniformity. The land is actively eaten away as technology expands, and the land is consumed for rigid industrial spaces. Yet, the work is still pleasing to the eye as Mortensen walks a fine line between aesthetic delight and a grounded dialogue.

Through this collection, Mortensen offers a quiet but insistent reflection on what is at stake as technological expansion continues to eclipse the natural world. Her paintings resist easy answers, instead holding space for complexity; beauty and tension, memory and warning. In doing so, she reminds us that the land is not just something we stand on, but something we stand to lose.

- Curated by Phoebe Caswell