| Landscape is primal in the human imagination. No
wonder: Our environs play a role in everything from basic needs
-- food, water, shelter -- to culture and sense of identity, to
spiritual beliefs and myths. Throughout history artists have documented
the landscape, and in so doing, mirrored and shaped how we see ourselves.
Think how 18th- and early 19th-century paintings in this country
glorified its natural splendor and vast frontiers, and helped to
define an ebullient, expansive national character. Think how generations
of American artists traced the evolution: from an idyllic, unspoiled
land to one conquered and irrevocably transformed by its inhabitants.
After World War II, romantic notions of landscape fell out of fashion
in the art world, replaced by abstract expressionism and a growing
sense of alienation. If traditionalists continued to paint pretty
pictures in, say, pretty places like Vermont, the urban art elite
disavowed literal referents altogether -- until Pop Art appeared
to ironically glorify the "culture" of consumerism.
Fast-forward a few decades. In the early years of the 21st century,
landscape appears to be making a comeback. Not, however, in its
former sentimentalized guise; and not necessarily looking like mountains,
lakes and trees. This Thursday, the Fleming Museum opens a major
exhibition called "New Turf." In it, 15 artists "upend
conventional notions about the means by which we represent the landscape,"
according to curator Evelyn Hankins. "New Turf," she suggests
in the show's catalogue, "surveys an array of innovative approaches
to the abstracted landscape -- and testifies to American artists'
fresh attentiveness to the rapidly changing environments around
them."
Ranging in age from 27 to 61, the artists hail from rural, urban
or suburban locales around the country; painter Gail Salzman is
the sole Vermonter. Their artistic "subjects" are diverse
as well -- from the natural ecosystem of a tidal pool to an artless
phalanx of big-box stores. But if the media are familiar -- painting,
drawing, photography, installation and sound -- the confluence of
"abstract" and "landscape" allows for content
that is unique, challenging and filled with deeply personal symbolism.
Significantly, "New Turf" also suggests that any natural
or unnatural "scape" affects, and can be affected by,
its inhabitants. While none of the artists in this show is specifically
an "eco-activist," each displays an acute awareness of
his or her surroundings, and as such may prod viewers to do the
same. Even in the aisles of Wal-Mart.
"This show came about from a realization that there was something
in the air -- there were a number of artists looking at landscape
from a different perspective," says Fleming Director Janie
Cohen, who ably held the museum's curatorial reins for 13 years
before handing them to Hankins last fall. "I think Evelyn has
really plugged into something," she adds, "and this show
will garner national attention." The title "New Turf"
is a double-entendre for Evelyn Hankins: She came to the Fleming,
and Vermont, just a year ago, after five years as an assistant curator
at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (see sidebar).
This is Hankins' first opportunity to curate a big show, though
the abstracted landscape is an idea she says she's had for quite
some time. "Vermonters are particularly attached to the landscape,"
Hankins observes. "So this seemed like the right place to do
'New Turf.'"
Tall and lanky, Hankins combines urban, black-clad chic with unaffected
warmth and enthusiasm. When she speaks, her words tumble out at
a fast clip, but are softened by a lingering twang -- her family
moved from Massachusetts to Austin, Texas, when she was 12. Hankins
says "New Turf" is "a bit of an indulgence"
-- a natural evolution of her own art-history interests. "My
close friends say this show is all about me," she concedes
with a grin. But while "there's creativity in picking the themes
and selecting the objects," she adds, "it's really about
the art; people should walk into the gallery and say, 'This is great
art!'"
Since her grad school days at Stanford, where she focused on early
20th-century American art, Hankins has been riveted by that moment
in art history "when they were trying to do abstraction,"
she says. The Whitney brought her up to speed on contemporary work,
which enabled her to follow the path of the abstracted landscape.
"I found a lot of artists were considering its importance,"
she explains, "but with the awareness that landscape isn't
always beautiful."
It's a given that not all artists live in a place as lovely as Vermont.
But "New Turf" is not simply a predictable city mouse/country
mouse kind of exhibit; there is no trashing of gritty urban environments
or boring suburban ones. And there's not a whiff of the "rural
sublime" -- that is so two centuries ago. In fact, one of the
show's sub-themes is the creation of unexpected beauty out of something
that is decidedly not.
The most striking example of this is Tom Fruin's "Project Survey."
The neutral title says nothing of the drama in this New York artist's
method. "Wandering through the back alleys and parks studying
the refuse of New York," says Fruin, 31, in his artist's statement,
"I find signifying detritus that I reinterpret and re-present
in a way that communicates both my investigation and the cultural
weight imbued in these forgotten items."
"Project Survey" is a large-scale (90 by 75 inches) "quilt"
made of drug bags, paper cigar bands and thread. The plastic bags,
some of them colored or stamped with a drug dealer's "logo,"
are cut into small squares and, says Hankins, stitched together
with an old-fashioned sewing machine. The irregular rectangle is
hung about a foot away from the wall; as light passes through the
translucent squares, it casts soft, lovely hues on the white wall,
as with a stained-glass window. "This piece combines drug culture
with American craft culture," says Hankins. "It is literally
made of trash."
According to freewilliamsburg.com, actor and art collector Willem
Dafoe shelled out 30 grand for a similar piece of "detritus"
several years ago -- "Sediment" was made from drug bags
that still contained traces of the illicit substances inside them.
"Project Survey" appears to be powder-free.
Richard Garrison, a 31-year-old artist living in upstate New York,
has chosen a safer and, some might say, duller environment. His
minimalist works in watercolor and graphite uniquely document a
suburban iconosphere. Garrison "measures consumer spaces,"
according to Hankins, and translates these dimensions -- such as
the aisle widths at Kmart, Target and Wal-Mart -- into graph-like
colored bars on stark white paper. In the long horizontal "Storefront
Color Schemes" (12 by 87 inches), the stacks of parallel bars
represent a row of big-box stores, and the colors echo those of
the stores' logos. Garrison's work insures we'll never look at Best
Buy or Home Depot the same way again. Garrison is not the only artist
in "New Turf" whose works require a little explanation
to be fully appreciated. While that may be said of contemporary
abstract art in general, it is particularly true when the artist's
method and intention are so fundamental to really seeing the work.
No visual clues are evident in Anne Appleby's austerely elegant
paintings. The simple geometry of "New Guinea Impatiens"
-- six square panels arranged into a 50-by-33-inch rectangle --
gives nothing away. Nor do the solid colors of each block -- in
this case, a pale palette of greens, yellows and mauve.
But a closer look reveals that the colors are not quite solid after
all; depending on the angle and light, they seem to shift subtly.
The paint, without a hint of brushstroke, appears almost iridescent.
Formally, Appleby's works are classically minimalist. So what are
they doing in a "landscape" show? Hankins explains that
the Montana artist intently studies the "essence of the ephemeral
color" of a plant -- in this case, impatiens -- and laboriously
recreates its composite hues with 50 layers of oil paint and wax
on each panel.
It seems a stretch to call the 51-year-old Appleby a nature painter,
but the natural world is unquestionably her Muse. "She watches
the trees and wildflowers of the Rocky Mountain West and the Pacific
Coast with a keen eye, noting the slide in the color of a leaf from
verdant, dazzling spring green to a darker, late-summer sunburned
reddish moss," waxed a Seattle Times critic in 1998. "She's
an abstract minimalist with an astonishingly finely tuned sense
for color."
Appleby so reveres color that she isolates it in boxes and asks
us to consider its effect free of context. Gail Salzman, a painter
from Fairfield, Vermont, does much the same, but her works are far
from minimalist. With overlapping layers and fields of rich, translucent
pigments, she creates abstracted landscapes that originate in nature,
but are mediated by her "internal landscape."
Salzman, 61, suggests that her work in "New Turf" is distinguished
by the use of traditional materials in nontraditional ways. "I'm
focusing more than the others on honoring the medium of oil paint
-- juicy, malleable, sculptural," she says. "I'm using
what paint does naturally to create a metaphor, or connections between,
nature perceived and my internal mirroring of dichotomies such as
light and dark, containment and overflow."
Favoring "accidental configurations" such as reflections
on water or overlapping plants seen beneath the surface of a tidal
pool, Salzman translates these observations with vigorous brushing,
layering and scraping. The resulting active abstractions invite
viewers to get lost in their own reveries and associations. In the
36-by-32-inch "Resonance," for instance, a rough circle
of dark greens, browns and reds might be imagined as a sort of portal,
through which burst bright, sunrise hues. Though it's impossible
to detect anything figurative in the work, its shapes and colors
are inextricably linked to the natural world. People have been defining
the landscape with maps since long before Columbus set sail for
the New World. In the 21st century, New York artist Janice
Caswell continues that tradition with deeply personal "mental
maps" of her own movements through time and space. "Urban
Legends" is a roughly 5-foot-long wall installation constructed
of paper, paint and pushpins. The Fleming commissioned the piece
for "New Turf," says Hankins, who describes it as documenting
Caswell's "movements around New York City on a given day."
Neatly arranged blocks of colored paper are punctuated by clustered
pins of varying lengths, representing different activities. Each
pin is enhanced by a tiny circle of brightly colored paper at its
tip. The overall effect is both decorative and, well, map-like.
Caswell says she has been working with this idea for eight years,
but began taking note of her environments as a child. "We moved
around a lot," she explains. "Because we never went back,
my memories are associated with place. I became very oriented that
way, and I started trying to catalogue all the places I lived. Over
time," she continues, "the work shifted and became about
how we see space, and how memories and thoughts are connected with
space. The way I'm showing them now, they're starting to blur together
-- which also happens with memory."
It's not necessary to know what Caswell was doing, or where or when,
during her day in order to find "Urban Legends" fascinating.
The installation is both playful and meticulous; its bold graphic
sensibility recalls Sonia Delaunay's freewheeling, circular motifs
in her "Rythme Couleur" series decades ago.
The other "New Turf" installation commissioned by the
Fleming also makes use of circles. Or, more precisely, round balls.
McKendree Key -- at 27, the youngest artist in the show -- lives
in Brooklyn, but she was born in Brattleboro and her family has
a home in South Londonderry. Given her ties to Vermont, Key welcomed
the opportunity to create one of her site-specific works in Burlington,
she says.
Her art is less about interpreting her environment than interjecting
something into it and recording what happens. In this case, that
"something" was 4000 plastic balls, each 3.5 inches in
diameter, scattered on the frozen lake near Oakledge Park. Key came
north for five days last winter, dumped the balls by day and removed
them at night. "Evelyn was worried the lake monster might swallow
one of them or something," she says with a laugh. When she
wasn't taking "tons" of pictures of the balls as they
drifted in the snow, Key communed with ice fishermen. "They
didn't really get what I was doing," she says, "but they
kind of watched over them."
In her catalogue, Hankins describes the scene: "The balls drift
and bobble haphazardly before coalescing into an abstract, yet continually
animated, monochromatic field. Unlike artists such as Christo and
Michael Heizer, however ... Key's projects take a more playful,
integrated approach, using plastic toys to trace natural forces
such as wind and water."
That was February. This July, for the exhibition, the installation
"Lake Champlain" is represented by a large-scale, color
photograph. While it would have been fun to see the work in situ,
the photo has a nebulous, lunar quality that attracts viewers with
the essential mystery of all abstract art: What is it? With its
white-on-white palette, flat, empty horizon and lack of scale, nothing
here helps the mind grasp what it's looking at. Key leaves it up
to viewers to scratch their own heads.
"The human intervention of nature is part of it," she
explains of her art. "By placing an object that's so artificial
and mass-produced, it's kind of about something that might have
gone wrong, or an accident that happened to create this rare experience
-- it's not supposed to be there, but it looks really beautiful."
"Art itself might be partially defined as an expression of
that moment of tension when human intervention in, or collaboration
with, nature is recognized," wrote critic Lucy Lippard in her
seminal 1983 book, Overlay. She was addressing the continuum between
prehistoric and contemporary art, but the remark could just as easily
be applied to Key's balls-in-nature explorations -- and, to a lesser
extent, each of the works in "New Turf."
Hankins' final challenge was to arrange these artworks of disparate
medium, size, color and concept in a way that would hang together,
literally and figuratively. Is a painting that depicts the memory
of walking through woods compatible with an aerial photograph of
chemical-containment fields? Would a flashy urban tapestry about
drug culture relate to a whimsical, lighthearted abstraction of
hedges? Does the exhibition's sole soundscape -- a computer-manipulated
human voice musing about a sunny day -- speak to, or for, them all?
"In installing a show," Hankins says, "there's a
tension between trying to create a narrative as you walk through
the gallery, and trying to make the pieces look good next to each
other." She says she was delighted, and relieved, to find that
these works do hang together, both because of the unexpected echoes
of color and shape among them, and the larger sense that everything
in our shared environment is ultimately interrelated.
"These artists create works that reflect the contested character
of America today," writes Hankins in her catalogue, "as
the country becomes ever more divided over what our national landscape
should look like." "New Turf" may not have an impact
in the Vermont offices of city planners, developers and others who
affect the landscape. But viewers will no doubt leave this exhibit
with a more measured consideration of their own places, maps and
journeys on the land.
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