Kelly Poe

The unabashedly gorgeous landscape photographs in Kelly Poe’s latest exhibition, “For the Wild,” might be puzzling on first glance. The large-scale images depict dramatic, lushly colored, and rapturously detailed natural scenes, including sylvan glens, dramatic rock formations, and peaceful valleys. In other words, they are just like the postcard, calendar, and desktop images that betray pangs of wanderlust afflicting cubicle dwellers everywhere. Yet Poe’s images actually represent the desires of those who inhabit much more confined spaces.

In 2006, Poe began corresponding with seven activists imprisoned as a result of Operation Backfire, the US government’s widespread investigation into animal and environmental liberation groups. She asked them to describe the natural places that help them maintain their sanity in prison, and then traveled the country to find and photograph these picturesque spots. The activists’ letters, reproduced in a hefty tome resting on a recycled crate table in the gallery, are filled with long, loving descriptions of these places—evidence that writing can be an act of reliving.

As with the archival turn in much contemporary art, viewing can also be a vehicle for revivification, although Poe’s images border precipitously on cliché: their loveliness is so familiar that one almost can’t see them. It’s the stories that bring them to life and ask us to consider them anew, not just as the memories of particular people but as acts of general, preemptive nostalgia for natural places on the verge of disappearance. The high-pitched beauty of Poe’s photographs is both proof that the activists’ cause is just, and an act of preservation itself.