Beyond The Visual – Experiencing The Landscape
“Echo”. Charcoal, acrylic, paper. 24×18 in, 2025
From the awe-inspiring canvases of the 19th-century Hudson River School to the pressing concerns of the 21st-century climate crisis, the American landscape has been a mirror for the nation’s soul. Kulvinder Kaur Dhew, a recipient of a 2025 Independent Artists Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, is presenting an exhibition of her drawings at Sugar Maples Center For Creative Arts located in Maplecrest, New York. Dhew’s work is a contemporary dialogue with the Hudson River School’s legacy, exploring the timeless concept of the ‘sublime’.
Dhew’s drawings are rooted in an immersive, almost devotional engagement with the landscape, a practice that echoes American Transcendentalist philosophies. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who sought an “original relation to the universe” through nature and self-reflection, Dhew attempts to articulate the same intangible resonance. In this exhibition, the artist’s materials are mainly charcoal, paper and acrylic, selected deliberately for their elemental, and concurrent, nature. These choices lend an immediacy and subtle intimacy to her work and are central to her exploration of witness and melancholia in the face of climate change.
The Hudson River School painters, such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, captured the vastness and moral clarity of the American wilderness, often linking their work to the era’s transcendental spirit. Dhew builds upon this rich artistic tradition but pivots the narrative from 19th-century optimism to a contemporary perspective, reflective yet somber. Her art serves as “visual timekeeping,” capturing moments of the current age in a dialogue that shapes her understanding of the American landscape from the point of view of an immigrant, artist, and woman. Born in England with the influences of her parent’s Sikh culture, the artist received a Western Enlightenment-based education—both providing a rich philosophical foundation for her art. While western education emphasizes reason, individualism, and skepticism, Sikhism, a monotheistic faith informed by the Hindu philosophic pantheon, has long offered perspectives on dimensions such as the “sublime experience of source.” Her work touches on ideas reminiscent of Transcendental Idealism, where the mind actively structures our experience (as posited by Immanuel Kant), merging the external world with internal emotions to create what Dhew terms a personal “inscape.”
“AstroCloud”. Charcoal, acrylic, paper., 24×18 in, 2025
In Dhew’s drawings, water emerges as a central, character-like force. Clouds and waterfalls describe energy representing the relentless, inexorable power of Nature. As testaments to the beauty and fragility of our environment, they are not intended as political protest, but as a space to engage the viewer through their own memories and associations, “drawing them into or out of the metaphorical storm of climate change.” By using mediums sourced from Nature itself (charcoal from wood), or plastic glitter, a seductive by-product of our age, Dhew creates a subtle irony that amplifies the poignancy of our natural environment under impact.
Through subtle nods to Quantum Mechanics, a highly complex area of theoretical physics, Dhew’s drawings seek to incorporate a modern, scientific definition of ‘reality’ into her spiritual and emotional landscape. Utilizing “perfect” symmetries (see “Echo”), these fields challenge classical notions of time, space, and reality, an unnerving complexity that mirrors our current human and planetary predicament. Dhew’s work implicitly connects scientific mysteries suggesting that our fragile environmental balance is rooted not only in fabrics of existence but in our rapid-fire imaginations that would appear to ignore reason altogether.
“Source”. Charcoal, acrylic, paper. 24×18 in, 2025
Ultimately, Dhew hopes her work will inspire people to reflect on their own relationship with nature and to take action to protect our planet, our home. It is a powerful fusion of artistic legacy, contemporary concern, and a deeply personal, cross-cultural search for the sublime in a fragile world.
The exhibition, hosted at Sugar Maples Center For Creative Arts, a program of the Catskill Mountain Foundation, is open to the public and underscores the work’s deeper mission: to foster a shared understanding of place. Dhew aims to encourage viewers to not only create meaning but also to “make special the environments we are fortunate to live in.”
This project was made possible with funds from the Statewide community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with support of the Office of the Governor and the New York Legislature and administered by CREATE Council on the Arts.
Kulvinder Kaur Dhew is an artist, educator, curator, and Director of Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts, a program of the Catskill Mountain Foundation.
Beyond The Visual – Experiencing The Landscape
An Exhibition of Drawings by Kulvinder Kaur Dhew
December 14-20, 2025
SMCCA ART STUDIO/Gallery
34 Big Hollow Road, Maplecrest, NY 12454
Opening reception
Sunday, December 14, 12-3 pm
Artist’s Talk 2pm
