Lookout Landscape

Lookout Landscape explores the iconic lookout tower, trail culture, and backcountry gear as a means to explore the rich (and sometimes conflicting) relationships between the “working forests” and the people that call them home.

Wildfire, and other landscape disturbances (both manmade and natural) provide a timely context for Borden’s playful, yet critical, approach to environmental understanding.

The wildfire-inspired work will explore diverse cultural narratives of Pacific Northwest forests through installation art, architectural design, material culture, and interdisciplinary science- communication at the intersection of culture and forest ecology.

The Big League Smoke stool features a beautiful fire-crew rendering by Kennedy Rauh and a colorful underside that casts an eerie orange glow that is reminiscent of a dangerous smoke filled atmosphere. Collaborators: David Buckley Borden and Kennedy Rauh.

David Buckley Borden is an Oregon-based interdisciplinary designer, artist, and educator working at the intersection of art, design, and ecology. Informed by research and community engagement, David promotes a shared environmental awareness and heightened cultural value of ecology and forestry. David’s place-based projects highlight both pressing environmental issues and everyday phenomena. Using an accessible, often humorous, combination of visual art and landscape design, David’s work manifests in a variety of forms, ranging from site-specific landscape installations in the woods to data-driven cartography in the gallery.