Lookout Landscape Exhibition

Lookout Landscape is on view at the World Forestry Center's Discovery Museum in Portland, running from September 5, 2026, through February 28, 2027. It's an immersive exhibition by Oregon-based artist and designer David Buckley Borden, who blends art, design and science to look at how we experience, understand and live with forests in the middle of environmental change.

The show takes its title and its central image from the fire lookout tower, and it uses that along with trail culture and backcountry gear to turn a gallery walk into something that feels like a hike. You move through the space and end up at a lookout tower, with wildfire as the central theme. It's presented in partnership with the Center for the Future of Forests and Society at Oregon State University's College of Forestry, and supported by the Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes, the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest and the Oregon Arts Commission.

This fits into Borden's broader practice in forest ecology and science communication. He spent 2021 to 2024 as a Feral Fellow at the University of Oregon and has worked on the EPA-B Boat project, so the exhibition comes from a background in actual forest science rather than just an interest in the outdoors. The way he pulls from trail culture and gear makes the whole thing feel familiar to anyone who spends time in the woods, while the wildfire theme keeps it grounded in what's happening to these landscapes right now.

It's on view with regular museum admission, so you can catch it as part of a day at the World Forestry Center. It runs through February 28, 2027, so you've got plenty of time to get to it.