Jan. 24, 2011, Previews

Second Nature: Landscape Variations

Sun, Jan 23, 2011

In contrast to the traditional Landscape genre that retains its origins to nineteenth century ideas of Nature and the Sublime -- the works shown in Second Nature refer to Landscape as a point of departure from which to consider other meanings. Curator Peggy Sivert Zask has brought together accomplished artists from Los Angeles and New York who frame Landscape within a contemporary context. The emphasis in these works is on interpretation, as well as substance, as evidenced by the variety of stylistic and conceptual methods represented. The artists featured are Hilary Baker, Steve Comba, Nancy Curran, Philip Earl, Virginia Katz, Roy Kunisaki, Constance Mallinson, Gil Mares, David McDonald, Jim Murray, Joan Perlman, Pam Posey, Greg Rose, Patricia Smith, Marie Thibeault, Ruth Trotter, and Devon Tsuno.

Among the artists shown, several use Landscape as an organizing principle within their formalist approaches. The idea of landscape is there, but its location within the work is subtle. Consider the conically reductive forms in Hilary Baker’s paintings. They stand at attention like mechanical trees in orderly relationships on their solid color canvas grounds. They give no evidence of a connection to the earth, other than their verticality. Ruth Trotter’s thick oil painted surfaces on linen assert their materiality while flirting with the illusion of depth and a horizon. David McDonald’s abstract sculptures employ humble materials and simple forms that confidently evoke one’s orientation to the stuff of the urban landscape.

Steve Comba and Pam Posey address the representation of nature as subject. Comba’s works employ literal pictorial spaces, often emphasizing the span of the open air, which brings a sense of grandeur to the experience, yet one that is tempered by the artist’s scientific sense of observation. Posey’s delicate watercolors on paper and oils on linen and canvas are also fine examples of an artist’s intense observation of nature. Her careful descriptions of weeds emerging from concrete cracks, for example, bring to mind the elegance of medieval illuminated manuscript painting. Patricia Smith’s equally meticulous drawings on paper are like ancient maps, yet they chart the terrain of human psychology and experience, rather than geography. Smith uses cartographical imagery, rendered with surrealistic wit and subtlety, upon which she places text. 

The words are clues to the art’s meanings – the landscape of emotional experience. The works of Constance Mallinson, Jim Murray, and Marie Thibeault deal with the impact of catastrophic events on the landscape. Thibeault’s large colorful canvases draw their inspiration from the chaos of disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes. The visual characteristics of her paintings are rooted in modern abstraction and a bold palette resulting in strikingly beautiful compositions. Murray’s photo-based images of smoke and fire are apocalyptic scenes taken from television news video footage. His classical and illustrative technique brings a narrative power to the work. Mallinson’s densely structured paintings and globes suggest a cacophony of worldly progress in which oil spills and pastoral scenes coexist. Her paintings are eerily reminiscent of the European ‘masters,’ as she uses their paintings as the basis for her compositions. The resulting mixture of historical and modern references are both fascinating and foreboding.

Less dystopic, yet also reflective of the urban scene are the paintings of Devon Tsuno and Greg Rose. Tsuno creates semi-abstract compositions based on the experience of moving through the landscape via automobile or bicycle. These works echo the city’s constant motion. Greg Rose’s candy-colored surfaces combine the hedged plants and architectural forms of suburbia with decidedly unnatural and unpopulated spaces. His elegantly stylized canvases hybridize Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, street art, and the cultural artifice of L.A.

The importance of one’s relationship to ‘place’, as seen in Tsuno and Rose, are also present in the works of Joan Perlman and Virginia Katz. Joan Perlman’s interest in the “restlessness of active geology” came out of time she spent in Iceland observing the extreme conditions of nature’s effect upon glaciers. Her multilayered and poured canvases are “abstracted stories of personal experience.” Virginia Katz’s mixed-media works on paper suggest micro and macroscopic photographs, or satellite images of the natural world. However, they are smartly crafted hand manipulated surfaces derived from her interpretation of the elements - land, wind, and ocean. Nancy Curran also emphasizes process -- her pouring method suffuses the development of her forms that ultimately reference nature. She considers these forms to be ‘procreative’ as constructed from accident and chance.

Second Nature: Landscape Variations is on view from January 29th through February 26th, 2011.