City of Berkeley Civic Arts
Cube Space Installation by Mary Anne Kluth
Mary Anne Kluth
Après moi, le déluge, 2025
Mary Anne Kluth creates landscapes that never quite come together, reflecting the uncertainty in how we see and understand the world around us. Her installations piece together clouds, rivers, cliffs, and glowing horizons, but stop short of forming a complete picture. The result is a space that feels both beautiful and fragile, reminding us that landscapes, like identities, are often constructed.
This sense of fragmentation mirrors our current moment. As we enter the second quarter of the 21st Century, we find ourselves in another technological revolution. If the first 25 years were defined by the internet’s reach into daily life, the present is marked by the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. AI is beginning to reshape how we think, work, and create. Where it will lead remains unknown, and Kluth channels this ambiguity into her practice.
Kluth’s fascination with illusion began with childhood visits to theme parks, fabricated “outsides” built indoors, and was deepened through time spent in real landscapes with her geologist parents. She also draws on 19th Century painters of the Hudson River School and Western Romantic traditions (Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, Thomas Moran), whose dramatic compositions mythologized American expansion into the West. Adapting their visual language through theme park imagery, from Disneyland rides to Sanrio Puroland, she employs devices such as darkened foregrounds and glowing horizons while leaving the wooden supports exposed to highlight the artificial nature of both theme parks and the national myths these painters helped create.
With a background in stage-set construction at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, Kluth builds her installations from handcut wood painted with acrylics. More recently, she has turned to the generative AI program Stable Diffusion, prompting it with Romantic landscape titles to produce synthetic versions of canonical works. She then repaints these computer-made images by hand. In doing so, she draws attention to the hidden act of theft behind the technology – AI companies training their models on artists’ work without permission. By folding this act of appropriation back into her own landscapes, Kluth asks us to reconsider authorship, illusion, and the stories we attach to land and identity.
@makluth
Curated by Kevin B. Chen
Cube Space Installation by Mary Anne Kluth
Mary Anne Kluth
Après moi, le déluge, 2025
Mary Anne Kluth creates landscapes that never quite come together, reflecting the uncertainty in how we see and understand the world around us. Her installations piece together clouds, rivers, cliffs, and glowing horizons, but stop short of forming a complete picture. The result is a space that feels both beautiful and fragile, reminding us that landscapes, like identities, are often constructed.
This sense of fragmentation mirrors our current moment. As we enter the second quarter of the 21st Century, we find ourselves in another technological revolution. If the first 25 years were defined by the internet’s reach into daily life, the present is marked by the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. AI is beginning to reshape how we think, work, and create. Where it will lead remains unknown, and Kluth channels this ambiguity into her practice.
Kluth’s fascination with illusion began with childhood visits to theme parks, fabricated “outsides” built indoors, and was deepened through time spent in real landscapes with her geologist parents. She also draws on 19th Century painters of the Hudson River School and Western Romantic traditions (Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, Thomas Moran), whose dramatic compositions mythologized American expansion into the West. Adapting their visual language through theme park imagery, from Disneyland rides to Sanrio Puroland, she employs devices such as darkened foregrounds and glowing horizons while leaving the wooden supports exposed to highlight the artificial nature of both theme parks and the national myths these painters helped create.
With a background in stage-set construction at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, Kluth builds her installations from handcut wood painted with acrylics. More recently, she has turned to the generative AI program Stable Diffusion, prompting it with Romantic landscape titles to produce synthetic versions of canonical works. She then repaints these computer-made images by hand. In doing so, she draws attention to the hidden act of theft behind the technology – AI companies training their models on artists’ work without permission. By folding this act of appropriation back into her own landscapes, Kluth asks us to reconsider authorship, illusion, and the stories we attach to land and identity.
@makluth
Curated by Kevin B. Chen