N4TUR3 essay

(above, from Tiger Strikes Asteroid's Facebook page; l to r: Thomas Vance, Misako Inaoka, Regin Igloria)

Here for interested parties, is an essay I wrote to accompany my gallery's latest exhibit, N4TUR3. To see images from the exhibit, go to www.tigerstrikesasteroid.com, or come see the exhibit up through June 26th.

N4TUR3 essay


Sometimes, nature is considered a mirror for humans; a place to see ourselves reflected – for better or for worse. In N4TUR3, this creates a visual paradox: we are both nowhere and everywhere in these works.

David Guinn’s Snowy Owl is a quiet avian portrait, but in the background snowpack we see the path of a recently-passed – but now disappeared – human. In Igloria’s Entanglement in Orange the human presence is clearly expressed in the manufactured product of a fluorescent-orange snow fence, holding a mass of foliage in a deathly embrace. The fence, an epitome of uniformity, is blaringly obvious in that un-natural state, but there is no other evidence of the humans that have made, and left, it. It is simply carrying out its naïve fate like a wind-up toy left to its own devices. And for Beth Brandon, the absentee human leaves behind an even more dynamic effect. In her two drawings, there is a before-and-after pattern of fire and smoke, but still no human (who we may assume has cut down the trees and struck the match).

Thomas Vance’s Cornice involves a more snarled evidence of this dubious human influence. Not simply a mostly-unaltered landscape on which human touch has left an obvious mark, such as in Snowy Owl, it is unclear from which direction Cornice has come from, or is going. In other words, is this an object which has been constructed to mimic nature? Or was it once a tree (Cornus, after all, is the Latin name for the dogwood family) but has now metamorphosed into a idealized tree-form; simply a product made from it’s model’s material, much like those toilet-paper roll trees from elementary school. While most of the other works are either on one side or the other of nature or artifice, Cornice is on the fence. Indeed, it is the fence for this N4TUR3.

Cornice embodies the question, and becomes the possible answer for the issues raised in N4TUR3: no matter its source or direction, a certain beauty is reached. In fact, in all these pieces, the results of human touch, whether the intent was good or bad, is always beautiful. Entanglement in Orange; Red Berries/Red Bird; The Need-Fire: every one is twisted, but twisted into beauty. Therein lies the possible answer, pointed out to us by art, but it should not distract us from the question, which will keep reappearing as long as we fiddle with nature the way we tend to: gene splicing; bio-engineering; rampant resource exploitation; drilling and scraping and poking. What we forget at our peril is that whatever we do to nature, we do to ourselves. The mirror always tells the truth.


- P. Timothy Gierschick II

Read more...

Art Thoughts, Week 27 -- Berd & Nature

Nature Study, Morris Berd, (American, born 1914), 1947, oil on canvas, BF 2084.

Honestly, the word “nature” has lost much of its former power. It is almost never adorned anymore with its Emersonian capital, its prominence displayed like a medal. Too often now, because of our society’s general disconnect with true wildness, our images of what constitutes nature falls into one of two categories: one, either a happy, idealized place inhabited by friendly woodland creatures; or two, where we humans are always an other; ever the stranger and never the denizen; a place we visit, but always return from. This is all patently false, says Wendell Berry in his book, Citizenship Papers. We humans, he insists, have forgotten how to see ourselves as integral to, and as an intrinsic part of, “nature.” Thus we do the world a disservice, and perpetuate a twenty-first century brand of disillusionment and practical disengagement. This mindset has produced all manner of pollution, abuse and general ignorance about our natural world.

The Morris Berd painting Nature Study binds up these issues into a personal, parallel question: is it in our nature (i.e. our essential character) as humans to be concerned with nature (i.e. the rest of the physical world)? We do practically all we can, it seems, to disengage from nature, then yearn for token respites within it in the form of vacations and weekend jaunts. In this picture, Berd is both asking this question, and offering a possible answer. The picture shows three beatific figures ensconced in a stylized forest, lit by a blood-red moon. The figures seem at peace, and involved in activity with the trees. One is grasping a tree trunk, as if to observe or contemplate it more closely; a second is also observing a branch, but more admiringly. And a third figure, moon-struck and small, is in awe of both the forest and the more monumental figures beside him. The painting’s composition is a haphazard grid of overlapping trunks and branches, which creates a thicket of quadrangles and trapezoids filled with an array of colors: the polychromatic diversity of forest foliage. This pattern both envelopes and involves the figures, revealing that they are not visitors, per se, but colleagues in the dynamic relationship which all living things are involved in: the scene would be incomplete without them.

This natural setting not only gives the figures import, but also posits a second question. Is care for this place in the nature of these figures, as intimately involved with this place as they are? The careful manner of the hands; the affection and awe seen in the gazes; the panoply of background hues; all point towards the affirmative. But Berd might caution that, as art often is, this painting is more prophetic than revelatory. Meaning, it pictures what could or will be, not necessarily what already is. And even if it does picture what is current, it is not normative, which points to another form of prophecy: to show what should be. And with 20/20 hindsight, we know that harmony with the natural world was entering a season of serious ebb in late, 1940’s America. Science began masquerading as a panacea with demigod status, and stole the capitalized esteem of nature, becoming Science. We are now on the bitten tail-end of much of this, but the sting has not fully cured us of our blind faith in science. Nevertheless, Nature Study holds its ground, showing us what could – and should – be: humans turning away from simply a “harmony with” nature, which still implies a detachment, to a deeper “harmonization” – a relationship dynamic; life-changing and genuine. We are nature.

Read more...