In her recent photographs focused on the landscapes of the American West, artist Louise Mutrel offers a vision where reality and imagination merge. Her work goes beyond capturing scenery: she searches for traces and hidden clues within these territories, assembling each detail with the care of an archaeologist.
Her images reinvent the natural landscape, blending environmental inspiration with pure invention. A sense of strangeness permeates the scenes: where one might expect to find humans, only replicas appear—creatures that feel familiar yet distant, such as aliens or dinosaurs. Their presence seems to fill the emptiness of these deserted spaces.
Mutrel also plays with scale, shrinking vast mountains into piles of sand and turning canyons into tiny fissures, creating places where past and future intertwine. Her work questions our perception of these expanses and the way we inhabit—or imagine—them.
