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Figures in white lab coats roam a man-made landscape, pause, and kill time. They come to us as representatives of logic, science, and human progress. We have seen such images before, heroically depicted on the facades of Soviet bas-reliefs, for example, or in Diego Rivera’s Ford Motor Company murals. Only now we are in the 21st century, however, and man is no longer the rational master of his surroundings, but rather a scourge, seemingly intent on the earth’s destruction.

In Figures in Landscape, Ragnar Kjartansson celebrates the humanist spirit as a child of his time, with a hint of irony …