Re-Search, exhibition review

Here is a review of a three-person exhibition at Paragraph gallery in downtown Kansas City.  It was published in the Kansas City Star, Dec. 8, 2010.

If you are suspicious of an exhibition whose title suggests you need to work hard to understand it, then you can rest easy, sort of.

The three artists of “Re-Search,” whose work is history- and science-based, contemplate Romantic notions of exploration. 

Michigan-based artist Thea Augustina Eck is the group’s heavyweight, capitalizing on 19th-century Romantic heroism. The foundation of her inkjet digital prints is the 1845 Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage to the Arctic. 

That expedition and all its men were tragically lost. American and British rescue missions ensued in the years after, while an enthralled public followed it all through that era’s media.

Eck creates highly dramatic narrative photographs that embody isolation and loneliness. Solitary people traverse a hostile, yet eerily stunning, snow-covered landscape. The figures look out across angry gray water, they navigate a frozen environment pulling strange instruments or stagger along with black balloons attached to their bodies.

The terrifying skies above this frozen land suggest a hostile environment in no uncertain terms. Yet the images are fantastical and alien and vibrate with this historical event and its emotions, which still captivate more than 150 years later.

Californian Hillary Wiedemann’s enigmatic works emerge from the science of perception. In “Sans Soleil (Diffracted),” Wiedemann manipulates the 1983 film about memory, “Sans Soleil” (French for sunless), strips it of sound and displays it in its entirety as if through a prism, so the only image is a circle of moving rainbow lights projected on a wall. For Wiedemann, her version becomes a memory of a memory.

“8:18” is audio recordings of the sun. According to the artist, if the sun’s rays (which take about 8 minutes to reach the Earth, hence the title) made a sound, this is what you’d hear. The disquieting sound — the visible made audible — is an apt theoretical companion to “Sans Soleil.”

Unfortunately, Wiedemann’s ideas are more exciting than the work.

In fairness, the gallery contributes to the work’s shortcomings. The space allocated to her work ironically allowed for too much ambient light for “Sans Soleil (Diffracted)” to show properly, and the sound from “8:18” seemed like street noise from outside. In a different setting, the works would be much more successful.

Kansas City artist Erika Lynne Hanson’s work functions like conceptual middle ground between Eck and Wiedemann. Using a predominance of natural materials including linen, cedar, living plants and ice, she examines impermanence, suggesting time’s passage made visible through her changing materials. 

Ice melts, plants may die, and yet in Hanson’s work, all change can be seen as positive and natural. But, in case change leads to instability and anxiety, Hanson adds her weavings, which represent order in a chaotic world. The weavings don’t telegraph stability, per se, but their homespun quality does make visual sense with her other materials.

Hanson’s most engaging works are two diminutive video projections based on paintings by the Hudson River School Romantic painter Frederic Edwin Church. “Glacial Observation: 3 and 4” are tiny projections, down by the baseboards of the gallery, of rocks and sea based on two paintings made in 1859 by Church during his voyage to Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada. 

Like Eck’s photographic essay on isolation, these video images are hypnotizing (although they needed to be in a darker room), pulling us into their vastness, which is nonsensically accentuated by the small size of the projection. 

Hanson’s and Eck’s works become companion pieces, visually reverberating together. Unfortunately, Wiedemann’s gallery placement almost excludes her from the group conversation. Her exploration of how the visual is made visible by light, a simple yet profound concept, is mostly lost in this iteration.

Overland

I reviewed a good exhibition of Kansas City-based artists (and one former Kansas Citian) whose work reflects their interest in the land.  Here is the review, which was published in the Kansas City Star.

Our union with the land is primitive and modern, emotional and pragmatic.

In the exhibit “Overland” at the Epsten Gallery, Marci Aylward, John Davis Carroll, Lisa Grossman, Mary Ann Strandell and Jane Voorhees embody our various relationships to the land. They relish the freedom that painting the natural world embodies, whether they stand in a stream or in a studio to create.

New Jersey-based Strandell, a former KC resident, produces energetic oil and pigment works on paper during her perambulations around the country. Painting in an abstract and extremely gestural style, Strandell favors untainted land over human intervention. 

“Los Huertos With Trees” is a dynamic and frenetic relationship of natural elements. Branches crisscross the picture plane, and are, at times, seemingly blended with the boulders that appear in the water and merge toward the indistinguishable shore. It is a spectacle of color and geometry.

Human commerce infiltrates Aylward’s linear paintings, in which power plants and industrial buildings dominate the land. 

Painting scenes from around her studio in Kansas City’s West Bottoms, Aylward presents the land’s pact with its industrial occupiers. In “Grand Street Power Station, River Market,” a smokestack slices into the sky, while a crisp diagonal line connects it to the earth. Painted shadows direct the eye though the painting. 

Taking a visual cue from the sharply focused paintings of Charles Demuth, Aylward creates spectacular light, bathing the scene in a crisp, crystalline glow, rendering the factories visually appealing.

Carroll also paints the intersection of industry and landscape. Here he turns to installation, combining miniature videos with detailed works on paper. The drawings are narrow and wide, and provide companions to three videos, “In and Out I, II, and III,” in which a wintry river flows among smoke plumes. 

The tiny videos provide ambient sounds of train whistles and wind rustling, informing the visual experience. While we worry about industry’s impact on the land, Carroll’s scenes suggest that anxiety and beauty may form an interesting cartel. 

Voorhees treats the land as a site of mysticism and mystery. Her dreamscapes exist in the spaces between what the land is and what it might be. These murky and earthy paintings on paper reveal her emotional and spiritual experience of the land. 

In “Sailor’s Delight,” a bright orange swath of light emerges out of the dark sky and ground. Playing off the ancient adage “red sky at night, sailor’s delight” Voorhees creates a visual poem. Her paintings provide contrast to Aylward’s or Carroll’s by trading on Romantic notions of spirituality and the sublime. 

Lawrence artist Grossman’s paintings are visual love letters to the vast Kansas plains. Dark and moody, yet realistic, they are elegiac images of Kansas that emotionally align with Voorhees’ work.

“Flatwater II” is an homage to the Kansas river. Viewed aerially (Grossman photographs the river from a plane, then paints in her studio) the river slices though the land like a ribbon of sun-illuminated gold. The river and the land carry on forever, until, as if in a dream, the river touches the golden sky. Grossman captures the land’s capacity to physically and psychically replenish itself and its people.

“Overland” artists have essentially imaged the land as unpeopled — no realistic human form provides scale or interferes with our view. And yet, human imprint is writ large on most of the paintings — through industry or through wonder and enchantment.

For the artists, the land represents commercial promise and spiritual fecundity, giving back, hopefully, more than we might take.