*Tula Telfair: Who Owns This Land* presents more than a dozen new paintings examining the human relationship to land through the scale, power, and apparent indifference of the natural world. Drawing on landscapes encountered through extensive travel from Iceland to Antarctica, Telfair reimagines rather than documents these environments, heightening color, distance, and geological scale to produce scenes that move between recognizable landscape and sublime abstraction. Some works situate subtle traces of infrastructure within expansive cobalt-blue terrain, while others depict seemingly primordial environments without human presence. Across these contrasting modes, the figure remains absent as Telfair considers mortality, insignificance, land use, and the human impulse to assign ownership and meaning to the earth. Landscape ultimately becomes a means of placing contemporary human activity within the far greater temporal and spatial scale of the planet.
