Considering the uniquely American collision of grandeur and banality, Valleyscape, Jack Hoyer’s most recent painting, his largest to date, finds the artist returning to the landscape of the American West as both subject and metaphor. The viewer is presented a view of a sloping hill in the Verdugo mountains, once the territory of the Kizh people, sharply demarcated by a lightly clouded blue sky. Weeds and vegetations mark its craggy dips and folds, as the forms stretch beyond the canvas interminably outward. __ Furthering his material exploration of painted, cut, and sewn canvas, Christopher Iseri considers the earthbound aesthetics of space and its huge wondrousness as conduits for form and erstwhile narratives. Vast cosmic expanses compress to become approximated visions of time and mass, where frayed threads hang from planetary bodies and stellar phenomena.