Jason Saager’s landscapes lure viewers into impossible spaces with divergent orientations. The stillness of his hills, foliage, and blue skies belie the larger upheavals where earth enfolds and unfolds its nearby trees amidst far away vistas. Sienese hills slide into farm fields of an American colonial vernacular, as if the rhetoric of historical depiction – how people paint the land on which they live – is entirely up for grabs. In one composition, rigid triangles of blue sky form mountains against a cloudy backdrop; in another, plains and hills collapse under the edge of a golden sunset against a grove of trees. Saager describes his work as “littered with scientific falsehoods, nonsense, and roads leading to nowhere,” where “absurd perspectives multiply, immutable natural laws become optional, and artificial habitats drift into alien territory.” This fantastical approach to landscape suggests worlds future, past, and only to be imagined, evoking the planetary landscapes of science fiction films and novels, where different laws of weather, physics, and relations apply. Saager’s upended landscapes dovetail importantly with a time when collective understandings of humans, nature, and their relationships are constantly upturned.