Creativity and Imagination bottled and ready to be sold. Need some Change in your life? Don’t worry, it’s neatly packaged and labeled for you, $2 a bottle for pure sweet Balance. On Saturday, September 15, the newly christened Pomona College Museum of Art, formerly known as Montgomery Gallery, was host to Sant Khalsa’s piece "The Watershed Project" and several other pieces that address people’s relations to their environment in the "Post Landscape: Between nature and Culture" show, currently on display.

Walk into a room containing Khalsa’s watershed project and you will see simple cardboard displays showing bottles of water for sale, just as you might in any market. Labeled "grace", "harmony", and "integrity, among other desirable human characteristics, they promise to sell you a version of who you want to be. At first, it seems to be a fairly basic display; in the end it is sharply perceptive commentary on both consumerism and deceptive advertising tactics as well as peoples’ relationships with nature. The materials, cardboard and water, can add a new dimension by tying these ideas of advertising and selling the intangible to nature. This was one of many pieces that showed the ways that people deal with nature by controlling it and tailoring it to their specified needs.

Another artist, Elizabeth Bryant, cuts out patterns of historical gardens into pictures of natural landscapes. The end product is an idyllic picture of mountains of streams with strange triangles and lines cut into them with no regard to the landscape itself. Because the patterns are cut in an almost deliberately random manner, Bryant conveys to the viewer the idea that manipulations of nature have little or nothing to do with the material of nature itself.

Skeet McCauley also explores the theme of manipulating nature in his photographs. The first photo is a panoramic view of a golf course. In the picture of a golf course the viewer looks through trimmed trees out onto a landscape that is precisely manicured and in the distance is a range of mountains framed perfectly by the layout of the course. While apparent that the natural elements of the golf course are tightly controlled, it is not until you read of McCauley’s experience working at a golf course that you realize creeks were diverted and mountains were moved to create that "perfect" view. The extent the land on which the golf course is built begins to seem both bizarre and brutal when one is shown the highly sterilized results of the land renovations.

The other photo is a large close-up of a bonsai tree, which looks like a regular tree until you notice the wires running all over the branches. The picture of the bonsai tree serves as another example of trained nature. The shining wires that envelope the branches of the tree are strangely foreign and give a sense of the constriction that results from this miniaturized version of nature.

In both images, all natural elements of the scene have been stripped and removed the viewer is only shown the elements deemed suitiable for viewing, left only to imagine each scene as it might have been naturally, once upon a time.

The show also examined the interaction between people and nature examined through man’s representations of nature. One piece that touched on that topic was Kim Abeles’ "Public Sitings." On a city map, Abeles hangs poker chips from each place of note. Abeles describes her own intentions as an effort to show the ways that a human experience attached to a place is the same, regardless of the actual physical dimensions of the area. Each poker chip attached to the map is of uniform size, each representing a human memory or interaction that renders the land itself meaningful. There are so many poker chips hung that the map itself almost becomes obscured and irrelevant.

Diana Thater provides a demonstration of the ways that nature is communicated to, and distanced from, people. With two televisions she displays the concept of "The Best Outside is Inside." The first television shows a crew of camera workers filming a stand of trees in the forest, while the second television allows you to see what they are filming. During the night the tress are light and portrayed as if it were daytime, while in the day they are filmed as if at night, showing how the viewer is communicating with nature through a filtered medium.

And of course, what discussion concerning people and nature would be complete without a discussion of pollution? But "post-landscapes" avoids taking the preachy tone that is so easy to fall into, and instead we see new definitions and approaches to the issue.

For example Kathryn Miller’s book of pictures along Foothill entitled "For Sale: Along Route 66" examines visual pollution of signs along the road. The pictures are filled with a sense of irony that both shocks and amuses the viewer. For example, one photo is of a billboard advertising Coca-Cola with the words "life is good" photographed against a backdrop of a smog filled sky. Miller uses the background of her photos to underline the incongruity of the presence of the signs, such as signs promoting "natural healing" in parking lots and fast food for sale signs surrounded by lots of natural growth.

Not only does the show present fresh perspectives on what constitutes pollution, it offers unconventional ways to combat pollution. A sand lot in the middle of the floor invites you to take with you one of Kathryn Miller’s seed bombs –small grenade sized clumps of dirt promised to blossom into a patch of native California poppies if thrown during November or December rain. This allows the art viewer to complete the art project himself or herself by participating in a sort of guerilla action. In fact it would seem the fact that it is left to "volunteers" to create this art piece that reflects the needs of more traditional environmental activists.

The Post Landscapes art show will be in the Pomona College Museum of Art until October 21ST