Smoke and Mirrors: Landscapes from the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art Collection
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art
Saturday 31st January - Tuesday 26th May 2026
Smoke and Mirrors draws on artworks from Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art’s collection in a group show exploring contemporary landscapes through photography, painting, sculpture, film, digitally generated artwork and drawing.
The exhibition features artwork by 15 contemporary artists and photographers who challenge our understanding of landscape through digitally rendered and manipulated imagery, artificial immersive environments, and imaginative fictional worlds.
For generations landscape photographers have sought to capture the beauty and authenticity of the natural world devoid of human interference. Landscape photography has also played an important role in preserving natural environments and raising awareness of environmental concerns. However, today, nearly every landform has been impacted by human interaction, and this continues to shift our understanding of landscape. Indeed, even landscape photography has played its role in turning sites of natural beauty into tourist destinations.
The artworks on display in Smoke and Mirrors push the envelope even further creating, manipulating and reimaging landscapes exposing the artist as creator and questioning the authenticity of any pictorial landscape in the digital age. Within the exhibition lo-fi mobile phone images are turned into monumental, painterly northern landscapes, fictional cityscapes are populated with capitalist robots and mythical creatures. Crater Lake in Oregon, USA is turned into a monumental data portrait derived from the lake’s GPS coordinates, a desert landscape is reimagined as an environmentally altered crystallised terrain, and artificially constructed battlefields are used for armed training and leisure.
Smoke and Mirrors is the companion exhibition to The Skin We Live In: Portraits from the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art Collection which ran in our Main Gallery from 23 November 2024 – 2 March 2025.
Exhibited artists: Craig Ames, Tim Brennan, Daniel Brown, Joe Clark, Cornford and Cross, Chris Cornish, Jeffrey Dennis, Dan Holdsworth, Nicola Maxwell, Katja Mayer and Peter Chadwick, Mark Pinder, Chad McCail, Kelly Richardson and a new commission by James Hutchinson.
Since 2006 Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art has acquired over 500 artworks by more than 50 artists or artist collectives with a focus on, but not limited to, lens-based media and the North East of England. Today the collection continues to grow and is widely loaned across the North East of England and United Kingdom.
Photos: Colin Davison