image courtesy Peres Projects and Hosfelt Gallery

Chris Ballantyne, Untitled (Berm) 2003, acrylic on birch panel, collection Beth Rudin DeWoody.

Seduced: The Relevance of Landscape in the 21st Century
Through May 8. Mill Gallery at Guilford Art Center, 411 Church St., Guilford; (203) 453-5947, guilfordartcenter.org.

Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes
Through May 10. Yale Architecture Gallery, Paul Rudolph Hall, 180 York St., New Haven; (203) 432-2233, architecture.yale.edu/sites/gallery.

Landscape is always memorial. There is an inevitable record of loss in any depiction of nature under occupation; the 19th century Hudson River School was essentially documenting disappearances. But the act of visual mourning has obviously gained in intensity of late, given the cascade of exhibitions being devoted to it, from the current "Badlands" assembled by Denise Markonish at MASS MoCA, to the upcoming "Global Warning" at Wesleyan.

An ecology of tedium might threaten us here, but there are a sufficient number of individual artists in two local shows who succeed in making the subject of landscapes their own, while escaping the stereotypes of the convention. Even when they do not, the predictable is not always uninteresting.

In Guilford, the absurd falsehoods of cell tower trees along local parkways are the source for a reverse irony in the work of Joseph Smolinski. His drawings, as precise as Persian miniatures, naturalize the antennas which now fruit from stump and branch in a perfect symbiosis. His print entitled "Satellite" wondrously updates the planet of overgrown baobab trees in The Little Prince, but one misses being able to walk outside and see one of his functioning Tree Turbines like the one that is installed in North Adams.

Joseph Saccio has always taken his trees literally, as in "Once a Tree," with its documentary of endurance. His "Wake for a Dead Forest" catalogues the multiple metamorphoses of wood in its very media: cardboard, twigs, plywood, paper.

Leila Daw's imagined maps and topographies press to the edge of cliché and are saved from it by the craters or landing sites for maternal alien ships that are paint dotted in sparkling circles.

Photographs by Karen Glaser include "Fire in the Swamp, #1" — redolent of "the smell of napalm in the morning" — and a series of inventive underwater images which unexpectedly trace the shallows rather than the deep places. Diane Burko composes an impasto of glaciers, with the disappearing ice saved only by paint.

Nothing in this show is so very far from catastrophe. Larry Schwarm's records of intentional fires on the Kansas prairies, even with their agricultural purpose, suggest that control of the elements is always a fiction.

Joy Wulke uses gilded bones to fashion reliquaries of nature, or prisms shaped into custom containers for laboratory specimens, or scattered plaster fingers that punctuate sentences of small sticks, like the disjecta membra — scattered remains — of some lesser saints. In her larger-scaled "Ascendance into the Unknown," a forked branch is framed by gilded oak leaves meant for an emperor of twigs.

In the Yale show, the natural landscape is an intrusion — or a manner of survival. This is movingly rendered in Chris Ballantyne's Untitled (Berm), where a last image of resistance is painted on a birch panel which itself erased what it records.

The notion of recycling is given another dimension, where it involves the conversion of empty suburban stores, as in Julia Christensen's Big Box Reuse series, and Paho Mann's Re-inhabited Circle Ks (Phoenix). There is a unique desperation here, as if to abandon the monstrosities would confirm the crime that went into constructing them in the first place.

There is something of the necessary obvious on display: The lawnmowers that trundle across the frames of Greg Stimac's photographs; John Lehr's stairway to nothing in Poughkeepsie, NY; and the scenes by Larry Sultan of suburban pornography in its mock pastoral setting, middle-class homes — a last, painful variation on Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe. But grief overwhelms the mockery.

Even an attempt at comic civil disobedience, Stefanie Nagorka's Aisle Project, which used home supply stores as sites for temporary, covert constructions, is here deflated by the legitimacy of a gallery, where the paving stones that it uses have been willingly donated by a nearby Home Depot. It may be that all we ever had of the landscape was what we placed in a frame. And all that we remember is only what we made out of it.