The Quabbin Reservoir, a contained flood built in the 1930’s to supply drinking water to the greater Boston area, displays and conceals the ideas of landscape and the built environment, far outside the city. In The Distance is Getting Closer Serena Himmelfarb reconsiders the aims of landscape painting, a tradition that sought to capture and harness the divine light of the wilderness, to respond to a changing landscape imbued with multiple histories, complex infrastructure and divergent ecologies.

The exhibition features work made through traditional methods of observation and idiosyncratic processes based in post-studio methodologies. Paintings, drawings, photographs, rubbings, scents, waters, and installations are presented as objects alone and images stitched into clustered groupings that expand the many ways art can approach landscape.