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Tag: Landscape
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PICK OF THE WEEK: Becky Kolsrud
Morán MoránNaked, decapitated women were a favorite amongst the macho surrealists of the 1930s, projecting their desire and power onto phantom breasts and bellies. The female figures in Becky Kolsrud’s surrealist paintings might also be missing heads and appendages, but they are ghosts and muses of a different kind. In Ghosts of the Boulevard (2023), a gaggle of headless women perch leisurely on a lush hillside, appearing blissfully blind, as if they never needed their heads in the first place. The painting alludes to various art historical subjects and works depicting nude women such as Matisse’s The Dance, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, (in other words, artworks commonly associated with “the male gaze”). The artist employs a color palette that feels overly saturated, artificial, manic even—colors Kolsrud refers to as “retail primaries,” shades and hues embedded in our psyche as consumer capitalism invades our retinas. Two paintings installed in catty-corner positions depict gated storefront window displays with mannequins adorned in various fads and fashions. Petrified and haunted, there is something eerie and enchanting about Kolsrud’s floating heads; their expressions are simultaneously blank and self-possessed, engaging and isolated. The Seinfeld episode pops into mind in which Elaine finds her doppelganger in the form of a department store mannequin, leading to a series of public sexual harassments causing her to steal the mannequin. The figures in the two paintings feel as though they are side-eying one another, or exchanging secret knowledge through the bars of their retail prisons. If I look at any of their bobbing heads for too long, I’m afraid my face will suddenly appear like Elaine’s mannequin nightmare.
In the epically large painting Evergreen (2023), Kolsrud’s grid motif takes the form of a sprawling cemetery on a hillside, a sublime landscape overrun with headstones stacked in neat rows that crawl endlessly into the distance. Pink severed limbs crop up between the graves like splintered yoga positions—spines twisting and thighs planking for eternity. A fleshy pink sun vibrates at the landscape’s horizon line evoking the history of sublime California landscape painting with a sense of irony. Time collapses in the ambiguity of the sun, which appears to be rising and setting, straddling the past and present. This spatial-temporal disruption and psychological tension permeate Kolsrud’s fragmented bodies of seemingly contradictory female forms that are simultaneously trapped and emerging.
Morán Morán
641 N. Western Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90004
On view through March 25, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: The Tale Their Terror Tells
Lyles & KingThe enchanting lure of a hole, the tender scuttle of a bug, the mysterious vibrations of the forest, the pungent bloom of a corpse flower, the mutability of our fleshy bodies in decay—these are things that have fascinated and bonded my years of friendship with Geena Brown. Our co-curated exhibition “The Tale Their Terror Tells” at Lyles & King in New York began as a conversation between friends with a mutual passion for all things dark and grotesque. At the beginning of the pandemic, Geena and I found comfort and joy in watching the horror films that captivated us from adolescence to adulthood (taking inventory in the form of a rather obsessive google spreadsheet that continues to grow). While many of our friends and family found our embrace of horror in a time of peril to be masochistic, we found it generative, playful, and cathartic. The intersection of horror and ecology would become an important source for us to think imaginatively about our survival despite feelings of overwhelming doom and terror. Using the concept “eco-horror,” (as it is applied in film, literature, and visual art) allows us to articulate the collective anxieties of our time and reckon with the daunting uncertainty of our world in crisis. The 23 artists included in the exhibition are guided by the strange, pushing the boundaries of reality and questioning what it means to be human. This kind of curiosity is similar to a child’s sensitivity to the mystifying and unexplainable dimensions of the world. This group of artists reveals a world of haunted topographies crawling with ghosts that whisper tales of desire and fear, casting shadows that trace the violent cost of modern “progress.” These artists practice a kind of radical imagining that calls attention to the vibrant interconnections embedded in everyday life that carry possibilities of resurgence and consider our individual and collective responsibilities. The deep friendship and mutual admiration that nurtured this exhibition speak to the ecofeminist values that frame our curatorial practices and ideas. “The Tale Their Terror Tells” is just one iteration of an ongoing inquiry into eco-horror that will continue to evolve as we leap towards the perils and possibilities of our future.
Artists included in the exhibition:
Angel Lartigue, Astrid Terrazas, Chris Dorland, Chris Hood, Dan Herschlein, Danny Moynihan, Erin Jane Nelson, Farley Aguilar, Felipe Baeza, Hings Lim, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Josh Kline, Karl Haendel, Kathy Ruttenberg, Kiyan Williams, Lila de Magalhaes, Marlene McCarty, Max Hooper Schneider, Miljohn Ruperto, Mira Schor, Sarah Jérôme, Xie Lei and Zoe Leonard.Lyles & King
21 Catherine St & 19 Henry St
New York, NY 10038
On view through August 22, 2022 -
The Spiritualized Landscapes of Hung Viet Nguyen
DEVOTED TO NATURE“Art is a universal language,” Hung Viet Nguyen says. “And when I came here as an immigrant, my English language was not that great. My strength was in painting. I slowly convinced people that my art is my language.”
Nguyen came to the US from Vietnam in 1982, with a background in biology and a lifelong passion for art. After making the move, he decided to make art his livelihood as well. A course in technical drawing led to a career as an illustrator and graphic artist while raising his children and pursuing his fine art. For seven years he stopped painting to experience nature both in solitude and with his family. “I absorbed the texture and the culture that nature taught me,” he says.
Pattern, color and subject all inform Nguyen’s narrative, spiritual art, the elements of which arise entirely from the artist’s personal experience and interpretation. “Artists balance what happens to them in life with their art,” he says. “When things were all good, sunshine—normal in California—my work was darker for a while, but when the pandemic hit, and it looked so bad, spirits were so down, I made my colors brighter. I wasn’t trying to escape but to balance what my art said with what was happening in the world.”
Nguyen in his studio, photo by Genie Davis; Regardless of the palette Nguyen uses, his work is always spiritual, and devoted to nature, as he himself has been since he was a child. “That is always in my mind from a young age. I had respect for trees, rocks, plants. It’s not religious, it’s spiritual in respect to everything surrounding me—after all, they’ve all been there longer than me.”
Nguyen is currently creating his fifth series of “Sacred Landscapes,” a body of work which average approximately 50 paintings per series. He viewed the cycle of nature through four previous series, titled “Cruelly Go Round;” “Coastal Sensibilities,” which focused on the sea; “Myscape,” referring to his personal landscape; and a more abstract series, “Symphony.”
“What led me to ‘Sacred Landscapes,’ was that we live in a city. I need to live here to work, to sell. But nature is a counterbalance. When I need to, I go to the beach or the trail. I call it going to the temple. Nature to me is closer to God than [I am] in a church.” He often travels the country and abroad to experience nature, with two areas in California most special to him, the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest near Bishop, and the Palos Verdes Peninsula near LA.
From series, “Sacred Landscape V,” #27, 11” x 14″. Inspired in part by Asian scroll paintings, highly textured, intricately detailed and visually immersive, Nguyen’s work is created by both palette knife and brush. He runs through so many palette knives that he has collected the used ones on a long chain that hangs from the ceiling of his studio. “I wear out the stainless-steel painting on canvas, that’s how much I use them. But I also use the brush when I want to create something more fluid.” He explains further, “For me the texture comes first, it’s part of my pattern. It can create anything, like a mosaic. When I am out in nature, I look, and I think, I can match that surface, I can recreate that. I think when you have a language, you have an alphabet. And with that alphabet, you can make anything, say anything, good or bad. When I am lucky, I can use my language well, and things like texture turn out as they should, smooth, or soft, or hard.”
Nguyen also sometimes incorporates actual words in his work. On his large-scale (48 x 84 inches) Sacred Landscape V, #32, his wife’s name and mother’s name are partially revealed within the grassy areas of the vast painting. “My wife understands me and lets me have the freedom to create. I also wrote in this piece ‘into nature, open out senses, feeling/seeing, gentle and dangerous magnificent, ask no more, common, extraordinary.’” The work itself is all that. To the left, a clear lake surrounded by a meadow, behind which a glacier rises, slipping into the sea; a steep, vertical volcano with hot lava still seething inside takes up the middle section; another volcano appears to have finished its act of tumultuous creation and adjoins a blissful series of waterfalls, ocean, and another lake around which two small human figures are poised under a rich burnt-orange sky. Both dream and fable, fairy tale and Adam and Eve–Biblical, this work is not just an alphabet of language but an entire novel.
From series, “Sacred Landscape V,” #36, 84” x 48″. While Nguyen doesn’t specifically see his Vietnamese heritage in his work, he realizes that “my painting looks different than Western painting in some ways,” in that he doesn’t work with perspective. “I create space that isn’t restricting. You can look down or up, as you do when you are in nature.”
Oil on panel, his large vertical work Sacred Landscapes V, #36 features a cavernous volcano, visually twinned with a cascading waterfall spilling into the sea; some smaller panel pieces such as Sacred Landscapes V, #27 feature glacial forms and sea, with the glacier cracking into the ocean; Sacred Landscapes V, #30 is a beautiful, sinuous tree. From an earlier series, Sacred Landscapes IV, #40, gives viewers a dark and transcendent night sky, with a mystical circle suspended above grey hills. In the foreground, a small figure and his horse cross this mysterious landscape.
His subjects in nature are limitless. “Nature taught me my style, which comes from a pattern,” he says. “I am just creating the language; it is a journey of discovery. I think I am going to keep painting for a very long time. I haven’t seen anything that limits me, yet. Sometimes a new element comes up, right now that has been volcanos.”
From series, “Sacred Landscape IV,” #40, 12” x 12″. On days that his studio is too hot or cold, the artist has begun doing smaller pieces in his home, using old product tins such as small metal cigar boxes. He uses both inside panels to create two separate small works that are linked together. In one such piece, Stars Grazing, a couple lie on the grass, looking up on one side. On the opposite side, a filament of stars is strung. To create these he uses pencil, ink, watercolor and varnish. “I use different kinds of varnish—some look old, with a lot of crackle in them. That is something I’m experimenting with.”
Nguyen is prolific and sells approximately 50% of his work. “When you sell, it stimulates you to work harder. Picasso once said he was a good collector of his own work,” he laughs. “It isn’t about selling for me though. I can’t control that. If I work honestly, I satisfy myself, and I believe that if you do honest work, the work will find a way to get out there. If my work is good but no one sees it, they don’t know it is there.”
See Nguyen’s work in March 2022, at the Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University Long Beach.
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Edward Burtynsky – Industrial Abstract
Edward Burtynsky’s principal subject over the last decade or so has been the industrial landscape, or more specifically, large-scale, frequently aerial views of major industrial operations, grids, excavations, or industrial waste sites. The photographs in his current show at Von Lintel continue in this vein – part of a larger project Burtynsky has titled (not surprisingly), Anthropocene. What is fascinating about the current body of work is that it returns us to the roots of visual abstraction, even the notion of landscape itself. The history of 20th century abstraction begins in landscape (e.g., Picasso’s proto-Cubist Horta landscape studies; and arguably before that). It could be argued that our entire notion of visual abstraction, of visual description, is rooted in our apprehension and appreciation of landscape as referring to a larger notion of environment and exterior surroundings generally. It is the way we define a world within our scope and grasp; also our place in it. Not unlike some of that pre- and early Cubist work, Burtynsky’s angled, aerial perspectives tease our perceptions of foreground and horizon-line, flatten surfaces and ambiguously shadow contours. More to the point, the photographs emphasize a further extension of the peculiarly human impulse to demarcate place – and the human place within it – through aggressive mark-making. Consider the stark quasi-Cartesian geometries of the ‘Salt Pans’ at Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat (2016) or the flattened, almost Tanguy-esque desert of Silver Lake Operations #16 (2007, above) interrupted by a kind of ‘flying’ spiral festoon. Considered in the aggregate, the Anthropocene makes the notion of an earthwork or land art seem almost redundant. Humankind’s ever more aggressive industrial-scale excavations and exploitation of mineral and other resources have dramatically transformed vast swaths of the earth’s surface. Our single-minded predations have changed the way we see landscape and in turn ourselves. ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ as a biblical prophet once wrote. In the end, too, apparently – and beyond this terrifying beauty, it means still less.
Von Lintel Gallery
2685 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Show runs thru April 22, 2017 -
Dustin Yellin
At first glance Dustin Yellin’s sculptures seem to be all about process and accumulation. They are a technical feat created by fusing layers of collaged and painted quarter-inch glass sheets into blocks that weigh thousands of pounds. These three-dimensional works can be seen from all sides and resemble exploded views of Archimboldo paintings, though the image disappears when viewed from the side.
Each work is made from carefully composed striations containing tiny fragments cut from various printed sources. This flotsam of contemporary consumer culture includes images ranging from bottles of soda and jars of Hellmann’s mayonnaise to images from history and art history, toys, cars, plant life, cityscapes, animals, the figure 0 and faces. Yellin makes two types of works: fantastical landscapes and static figures. Sensorium, Aisha’s Meadow Cave and Etruscan Ice Cave (all 2013) feel like aquariums frozen in time, devoid of fish and filled with strange narratives that extend from the present back into history.
Dustin Yellin, Sensorium, 2014. Yellin’s figures stand squarely in their glass cages. While the position of the hands and head may vary, the stance is the same in each sculpture and resembles an anatomical model. The 2014 series of figures is titled “Psychogeography,” after the Situationist term referencing urban wanderings. These are collections of urban detritus found in the street and in the media that, according to Yellin, are “the captured and frozen dynamism of culture.”
In Psychogeography 43, the figure pushes his hands against the glass. In Psychogeography 45, he has a mechanical hook-like hand made out of red paint and a head that morphs into an array of painted dots as it moves from side to side. Psychogeography 38 looks as if it was created by overlaying multiple fingerprints to outline a ghost-like figure. The well-formed body in Psychogeography 41 is almost complete, with only thighs, mid-section and face missing parts. Here the cut-outs are more diffuse, revealing isolated cityscapes made of printed images of skyscrapers. Only a trace of the figure remains in Psychogeography 8, caught in swirls of paint, resembling an explosion.
Dustin Yellin, Psychogeography 45, 2014. Yellin’s complex cabinets of wonder, or densely packed terrariums, contain dystopic and utopic moments of imaginary worlds. Impossible to take in all at once, the works are a feast for the eyes. Each glance reveals more and more, like a treasure map unfurling in a never-ending route to the gold.
Yellin’s process is awe-inspiring, and the fabrication of his sculptures attests to his skills and patience. However, the works remain enigmas. The viewer’s reward could be witnessing a portrait of contemporary society and a critique of its influence on mankind; yet, like Marco Brambilla’s time-based montages of Hollywood film clips, Yellin’s sculptures, carefully orchestrated, offer little commentary on his source material or contemporary culture. They allude to the fact that man is trapped, made of infinite parts, a collection of fragments, and is on display, but do not offer interpretation. Yellin’s attitude toward the work is celebratory; he is more attached to the intricacies of their make-up than what they say about the world from which their content is derived.
Dustin Yellin, Psychogeography 48, 2014. -
Michael Light
Michael Light has been shooting photographs of the western U.S. landscape for over 20 years. They are generally taken from a small light airplane that he flies himself, and explore the majesty of these vast and variegated lands, creating dense patterns akin to abstract art. At the same time, many sites reveal details about our use of the land showing it to be anything but a beautiful or intangible design. While Light himself steers clear of moralizing about how and why the land is tilled, mined, tunneled, poisoned, drained of resources or riveted with abandoned artifacts, the viewer can infer Light’s extended considerations about what is going on out of sight in the immense hinterlands of the West. His current exhibition “Idaho, Two Sublimes,” places rather different takes on Idaho side by side as a way of bracketing the artist’s overarching photo project.
The “Sawtooth Mountains; Stanley, Idaho” series (2009) of large-scale black-and-white prints is aligned with a study of romantic beauty, a romanticism that is generated by the sheer scale depicted and the kinship to landscape painters such as Caspar David Friedrich or Albert Bierstadt. The closely cropped images have no horizon line, since they are viewed from above, and alternate between jagged, flattened modernist-like patterns and oddly displaced and weightless landmasses. The use of the stark black and white further skews a viewer’s ability to recognize the mountains. Light appears to employ this mental distance to suggest viewers look more closely. Beauty is central to his construction of meaning but throughout is his ability to cause skepticism and doubt.
Michael Light, Interchange of Highways 60 and 202 Looking West, Mesa, AZ, 2007. Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery. Works in his other series delve into human usage of the earth. The foregrounds center on outlying areas of our wilderness turned into places for dumping, storing and testing an incredibly messy and dangerous weapons system. Strangely iconic when seen from the sky, the circular and square buildings and connecting roadways that have been cut into the land almost turn into emblems or talismans, beautiful in their own right. Once abandoned, however, they look more like scar tissue on the earth than a symbolic beacon of ongoing societal or industrial progress. Light provides us with a tangible reminder that off in the distance and out of view, the military industrial complex is busy turning the wheels of its bellicose enterprise, churning up the earth in its path.
Michael Light’s double take hinges on our moving back and forth between the stirring majesty of the one set of images and the history of destruction the other recounts. The power of his images reside in the mixture of surface beauty and depth of truth he discovers. Implicitly sharing the company of photographers such as Richard Misrach, collectives such as CLUI, and activists such as EcoFlight, he moves us to examine and critically account for our world.
