Recovering Beauty: The 1990s in Buenos Aires
The Blanton Museum of Art
Through May 22

By Alexis Salas

Marcelo Pombo, Navidad en San Francisco Solano (Christmas in San Francisco in Solano), 1991, Cardboard, nylon, and synthetic enamel on wood, 31 1/2 x 47 1/4 inches, Collection of Mauro Herlizka, Buenos Aires. Courtesy of the artist.

Ursula Dávila-Villa’s first solo curatorial project at the Blanton Museum of Art, Recovering Beauty: The 1990s in Buenos Aires, is one of sparse staging and thoughtful curatorial choices. Organized into discrete vignettes, spaces of clean white facilitate an exhibition experienced through visual ideas manifested in the artworks, paired with discrete bits of historical and social context. Such cool reserve allows the art to act playfully.

The show begins with colorful and graphic works. Formal and abstract yet not abstemious, they are celebrations of urban lived experiences (Fabio Kacero’s “furniture-canvases” incorporate symbols that he made to represent people that he admired in the language of street signage) and the senses (Graciela Hasper’s playful reinterpretation of Hans Arp-ish colors and shapes). They also use abstraction in such a way that makes them somewhat cryptic, simultaneously evoking the sensual and suggesting a reformulated notion of aesthetics.

Showcasing work nicknamed “arte light,” the exhibition explores how these artists “recover” beauty by unabashedly investing in the visually seductive object. Marcelo Pombo’s Navidad en San Francisco Solano [Christmas in San Francisco in Solano] (1991) is an amalgamation of cardboard boxes over which he has painted white dots. It reflects both his desire “to decorate” in the most literal of senses, as well as a historical moment of the onslaught of neoliberal globalization; as foreign products began overwhelming the local market, international and local goods came to be looked upon with an anthropological eye. Omar Schiliro’s untitled plastic and glass sculptures which illuminate, all tendrils and exquisite faceting-- be it plastic or crystal-- paired with bare neon bulbs and plastic bowls, make looking a conscious act. They need a viewer just as much as electricity to bring them to life.

Omar Schiliro, Sin Título (Untitled).

The pleasure of the act of looking is a theme which, in the Argentine context, could be understood as a subversive reaction, both to the end of oppressive governmental regimes with rigid notions of what kind of art was worthwhile as well as to the spread of AIDS. AIDS hit particularly hard in the community of artists upon which the exhibition focuses—which, rather than those of the entire city of Buenos Aires, as the title might suggest, is limited to those of the Rojas Gallery, one (very small) space in (the University of) Buenos Aires. In the context of such loss and sorrow, a joyful return to the aesthetic, the “light,” and thus the “gay,” during a time of ostracization, is embraced by the artists throughout the exhibition. The strategies are as varying as graphic depiction of sex acts in a pastel-colored Keith Haring-esque style such as Beto de Volder’s Orgía [Orgy] paintings to Feliciano Centurión’s hand-embroidered textiles with phrases such as Me adapto a mi enfermedad, (I Adapt to My Illness) and La muerte es parte intermitente de mis días (Death Is an Intermittent Part of My Days) which he produced in his last bedridden months of life.

Yet even in evoking such charged themes, the works, indeed the show, project a certain ease. In the case of the exhibition, it is a studied ease; the show as well as the symposium and catalogue, which includes the first translations of the artists’ texts, that accompanied it are the product of four years of planning and many communications with the artists. Allowing the viewer to become as involved as she pleases with the visual or historical elements of the work, Recovering Beauty gracefully eschews questions of how to deal with the contemporary (which can be difficult to historicize) and the Latin American (which can be difficult to contextualize). It manages to engage both, and in doing so, engages large and diverse audiences.

Alexis Salas is a PhD student in art history at The University of Texas at Austin based in Berlin.

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The Sultans Played Creole
Champion, Austin
Through May 28

By Lee Webster

Marjorie Schwarz, From left to right: Untitled (MJS4)"; "Untitled (KLN3)"; "Untitled (KRN3), 2010, Oil on canvas, 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Hinting at a new Americana, nostalgia, a reclamation and a war, The Sultans Played Creole, curated by James Cope for Champion, is a show that reveals itself in fits and starts. It’s got something big to say but is still casting around for the right way to get it out. It isn’t that many of the works aren’t compelling on their own, but as a whole they all hum at the same pitch. As a result, the ensemble never reaches that crescendo that pulls together the work into a cohesive whole.

The show title references the Dire Straits hit “Sultans of Swing,” a song that unfurls scenes from the American South: faded jazz greats, honky-tonk heroes and old timers whistling Dixie against a shifting social landscape. The pieces in the show all speak in a similar manner, opaquely referencing the shared American yearning for a near-distant past and a constant searching for identity. Many of the pieces evoke the cinematic nature of memory. And it makes sense. Americans create and savor their nostalgia through cinema.

The sidewalk-facing gallery windows hold Amy Revier’s photo series A Quiet Root May Know How to Holler (2011). These images of a baby carriage sitting in deserted public spaces, emitting billowing clouds from explosions of black smoke and fire, are jarring and lovely, dramatic and unsettlingly funny. They quite literally start the show off with a bang, but inside it quiets to a dull murmur.

Marjorie Schwartz’ untitled oil portraits are reminiscent of poorly focused family photos or ghosts caught in some limbo between this world and the one beyond. The small works are understated but compelling. In the second room, Caris Reid’s ink on paper drawing Samantha (2010) works in a concert with these portraits. The figure is distinctly the Samantha of the ‘60s sitcom Bewitched. Rendered in ochre tones, Samantha stares directly out of the paper, hands extended, casting a spell.

On an adjacent wall, Kadar Brock’s untitled painting integrates house paint, spray paint and ball point on a highly textured canvas that conjures grave rubbings and faded xeroxed images. The painting oscillates as much between abstract and representational as it does the material and ethereal worlds. It perfectly captures the sense of liminality for which the show strives.

Nick Mathis’ assemblage sculptures incorporate altered found objects that seem as if they’ve been lifted right from their original places in the world only moments before. In his piece Shoes (2011), a pair of men’s dress shoes are attached to a white board and painted over. Even a shadow is painted, giving the sense that the body of the man just dematerialized. However, in the close space, the small sculptures don’t hold the gravitas they otherwise might.

This is a show for lean times, one that focuses on works that are manageable in price and size. Lots of small-scale works means the gallery feels crowded and that the standout works that demand more attention don’t get the space they deserve. Still, the show is definitely worth a look for some transcendent moments and exciting new work by Texas artists. While you’re there, don’t overlook the small screening room in the back. Rachel Adams and Zoë Taleporos serve up an exuberantly fun video reel that can’t be missed. Originally curated for Queens Nails Projects in San Francisco, QNTV is a messy, musical queering of the universe through a handful of videos that investigate what it means to be an artist in a world ruled by pop culture icons and how to sell your body without selling your soul.

Lee Webster is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas.

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Jade Walker
Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, San Antonio
Through May 14

By Lana Shafer

Jade Walker, Quadri-Poise, 2011, Fabric, found objects, Nitto tape, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Jade Walker’s newest installation Quadri-Poise, the second and final sculptural installation sited at Blue Star in San Antonio as part of the 2011 Texas Biennial, continues her conceptual and formal investigation of the body through a poetic assemblage of found objects and fabrics. Featuring a pared-down palette of flesh tones with blood red accents, Quadri-Poise is a tableau of varied sculptural elements exploring dualities in material, form and body politics.

Nestled in Blue Star’s smallest, most intimate gallery space, Walker’s installation is reminiscent of a domestic setting. The walls are neutral beige, while a portion of the floor is covered with Nitto tape placed in parallel strips like hardwood flooring. However, other elements in the space produce an uncanny atmosphere more appropriately associated with a surrealist dream world. Perched center stage is a cream and white birdlike figure with a bulbous base covered in fur fabric, a long erect neck encased with a foam collar (or neck brace) fastened with zip ties and brass brads, and a protruding beak. The sculpture’s core, and the crux of the installation, is a walking cane with a four-footed base called a Quadri-Poise— a piece of medical equipment signifying support, but also the fragility of the body.

On the back wall hang three round assemblages, also intimate in scale. Punctured with stickpins and adorned with knoblike wooden pieces, these flesh-toned objects appear as breasts, bodily fetishes on display. The baseboards are lined with a series of small, uniform, oblong-shaped sculptures made of rolled fabric and propped up against the walls like a ritualistic accumulation of bones. A large wooden mallet looming in the corner lodges another amorphous sculpture, crafted out of sutured white fur and cream fabric, against the wall. Hidden to the viewer from outside the gallery’s open double doorway, the mallet’s presence becomes ominous once the viewer enters the space. If the mallet were to suddenly drop, the central fowl would incur a heavy blow. Considering this implication of potential violence, perhaps the bird is a mythological reference to Leda and the Swan, but unlike the ancient Greek myth, in which Zeus becomes a swan to rape and impregnate Leda, Walker’s swan is fractured and vulnerable, confusing the gender roles of this motif frequently depicted in art since the Renaissance.

Walker’s soft sculpture and focus on abject bodily subjects calls to mind such precedents as Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, Annette Messager and Dorothea Tanning. Inherent to this lineage is also a reaction to the masculinity of minimalism. While Quadri-Poise utilizes the monochromatic and serial language of minimalism, Walker also suffuses each object with insightful content and subtle human touches. The viewer’s close inspection of each element in the work is highly rewarded, as poignant details—like the strand of red thread connecting a soft tuft of fur to a stickpin—are artfully revealed.

Lana Shafer is a freelance writer and art historian based in San Antonio, Texas.

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Brian Fridge
Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Dallas
Through May 14

By Charissa Terranova

Brian Fridge, Sequence 36.3 - 36.5 (film still), 2010, Black and white, silent video, 4:32 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

Brian Fridge’s latest engagement with low-tech video and abstraction at Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Sequence 36.0, is all about growth and form. Two moving-image pieces occupy the Project Gallery, Sequence 36.3-35.5 (2010) on a small monitor hung on a freestanding wall and Sequence 36.1 (2010) projected in large format on the wall of the adjacent gallery. The two distinct black and white videos show leafy tendrils that slowly grow out in spokes from a drain-like hole at the center of the screen. Separated by space and scale, their relationship is not so much one of mimesis and repetition but refraction, with the little one on the monitor seeming like a blasted bit shot through an invisible prism connected to the large projection on the wall one room over. The differences between the two video installations are minimal but significant.

There is confusion here as to whether this is video art or a video installation. If there were two videos showing the same exact imagery each in sync with the other, this would be a project about video art as armature and installation. It would simulate the pyrotechnics of full-body stimulation— a body roving through space looking at video. Since each shows a slightly different version of the “sequence,” then we can deduce that these videos focus on the mesmerizing abstract organic floral fungus form at the center of each unique looped piece. This is video about seeing content— what is inside the frame— first, and affect and self-reflexivity second. The greatest power of this show is in the way it feels like an installation, if only accidentally— the way the two videos interrelate when seen simultaneously from the corner of the room.

In terms of content, we might look to Fridge’s recent explorations in physics, metaphysics and biological forms. In keeping with his studies, the work in Sequence 36.0 brings to mind Scottish biologist and classics scholar D’Arcy Thompson’s 1917 book On Growth and Form. An atypical tome, On Growth and Form is a long, descriptive and non-linear study of biological form and change according to mathematical principles rather than Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Over 1,000 pages long, the book has copious images, many of which are similar to Fridge’s mutating plant-like form.

A Whitney Biennial artist in 2000, Fridge is now famous for concocting hypnotic abstractions in motion, the most celebrated of which was Vault Sequence (1995), a galactic tornado of rotating white particles that were actually the workings of his freezer as it defrosted. As with this seminal piece, there are many potentialities within Fridge’s new work, the linchpin of which hinges on how they are installed. The current installation of Fridge’s video is extremely powerful because they are both visible at once. Installed singly, each in its own space, the works would come across differently— less rhythmic, more subtle and more a kindred spirit of the precedential non-objective experiments of 20th-century modernism.

Charissa N. Terranova is Assistant Professor of Aesthetic Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas. A freelance curator and scholarly critic, she has recently completed a book-length manuscript entitled Automotive Prosthetic: The Car, Technological Mediation, and the Conceptual Turn in Art, 1951-Present.

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Matt Connors and Fergus Feehily
Dallas Museum of Art
Through August 14

By Erin Starr White

Exhibition view

A conversation in and about abstract painting is taking place in Concentrations 54: Matt Connors and Fergus Feehily. Typically showcasing the work of a single artist, this most recent iteration of the series highlights the work of two painters using the idiom of abstraction to re-envision its merits. Organized by curator Jeffrey Grove as two small, discrete shows of the work of Berlin-based Fergus Feehily and New York-based Matt Connors, Concentrations 54 acknowledges abstract painting’s past, then dismantles and reuses its vocabulary to refreshing end. This is two painters exploring— for the most part successfully— ways in which contemporary abstraction can function as a series of open-ended investigations.

Outside the exhibition’s entrance hang bracing reminders of the trajectory of abstract painting. An Ocean Park Diebenkorn presages the vibrant baby blues and cool mint greens of Connors’ best canvases. A monumental Sam Francis, paint sliding downward upon a cool white canvas, presages the thoughtfully unfilled centers of Feehily’s small compositions. The authority of these canonical works contrast nicely with Connors and Feehily’s work, foregrounding their irony and charm.

The left half of Concentrations houses Feehily’s petite paintings on MDF and multimedia works in cloth and paper, a steady stream of works whose uniformity of size suggests a man-made horizon line. Feehily’s works are generally 8x10 inches, the familiar size of a sheet of loose-leaf paper. These paintings, abstract arrangements of carefully fashioned space, outshine the artist’s fabric compositions, which look like rote studio exercises in comparison. In Untitled (2010), Feehily has painted a sparse, geometric web, perhaps a micro-view of sugar crystals. The ground for this unfolding spatial framework is a mottled, grey-blue field that hovers just beneath the surface of the picture place like an impenetrable fog. Similarly, Into the Garden (2009) provides a smoky, lavender ground for a stratum of green, lozenge-shaped marks mingling with black specks that seem to vibrate, activating a neatly framed space. Simplicity itself, Feehily’s frames consist of two thin strips of wood— one top, one bottom— fastened in place with a screw in each of the painting’s corners. This framing solution belies the objectness of Feehily’s spatial creations; the screws subtly echo the animated flecks of dark paint, making the humble frame a central consideration in the piece. Several objects from the Museum’s encyclopedic collection have been selected by the artist and pepper the installation, spanning disparate eras and cultures; the morphological similarities these objects share with Feehily’s work foster deeper study of the artist’s simple yet sophisticated compositional strategies.

The framing solution proves to be a strand connecting the two artists. In Connors’ You’re Gonna Take a Walk in the Rain and You’re Gonna Get Wet (2011) two brightly-colored framing strips (one Pepto pink and the other Kelly green) subtly and elegantly expand the pictorial space beyond the bounds of the canvas. Long, deliberate pencil marks delineate the space into sections that recall the immediacy of Agnes Martin’s meditative, slightly unsteady graphite lines. The unprimed canvas’ baby blue stain on the left and blood red one on the right create a naked center toward which oil from the intensely hued paint seeps. I am immediately reminded of Robert Motherwell’s pseudo-oozing forms— Connors does not pale in comparison. Though a few of Connors’ more brash, expressive paintings lack presence like formulaic academic exercises, more muted examples like Foil (2011) are revelatory. Here, a repeated crescent hovers above a field of hazy persimmon, taupe and denim blue, a Delaunayesque vision completely refashioned.

Through smart study of the past and clever experimentation with its elements, Connors and Feehily forge a fresh approach to abstraction. The positioning of these works so near the heraldic canvases of post-war machismo make clear the point that abstract painting has life in it yet.

Erin Starr White is an art historian and writer living in Fort Worth. She received her MA in Art History from Texas Christian University, is a contributing art critic for Artlies and Art Papers and is currently Assistant Curator of Education for Student and Teacher Programs at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

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The World According to New Orleans
Ballroom Marfa
Through August 14

By Rachel Stevens

Dawn Dedeaux, Steps Home, 2008, Acrylic, 30 x 48 x 43 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Aurthur Rogers Gallery, New Orleans, LA. Photo © Fredrik Nilsen.

What would the art world look like if New Orleans were already a center? This was curator Dan Cameron’s “mind exercise” that catalyzed The World According to New Orleans, an exhibition at Ballroom Marfa that gestures toward introducing the art world of New Orleans to a wider, international art audience. As an art community New Orleans has, in the past, almost willfully refused influence from New York and other art centers. Characterized as insular, however, New Orleans already has an incredible mix of international cultures, including African, Native American, French, Spanish, Cuban and Haitian, that all play a role in the city’s cultural production.

Some orientation to New Orleans’ art heritage is in order, and almost half of the Ballroom is devoted to important work from the later part of the 20th century. Most of this work is figurative in some way, showing ritual processions, characters from the local community and symbolic representations of spirituality and death. God told Sister Gertrude Morgan to paint and so she did—her self-taught paintings of religious subjects hang as testimony along one wall. Noel Rockmore’s more technically accomplished figurative paintings are reminiscent of the styles of a handful of art giants from the canon of 20th century art, but wholly uphold their own cryptic dynamism and beauty. Roy G. Ferdinand’s marker pen drawings warn of urban and spiritual ills. “Indians” dance in slow motion in celebration of Easter in a disintegrating film by Jules Cahn, and documentary photographs by Michael P. Smith show parades, musical processions, dancing, church and a funeral—performances revealing almost no apparent distinction between pleasure, spirituality and mourning.

The elephant in the room is Hurricane Katrina or as residents would rather call it, according to Cameron, the “federal levee break of 2005.” The disaster directed the world’s attention toward this complex place and created a whole new condition from which the art community could reemerge. More than creating a blank slate, the flood, said artist Skylar Fein during a panel discussion on January 10th, “burnt the culture, but returned the nutrients to the cultural soil [as] a forest fire [does].” An art scene was born where previously there hadn’t been one, with a surge of collective art spaces and activity. New Orleans is now, says Fein, between floods, “like Weimar Germany [between the wars], a cauldron of culture.” As it grew, it also attracted artists and curators from elsewhere. Katrina prompted the New Orleans art world to leave the space of regionalism.

The work of the last five years on view here still appears rooted in the culture and place of New Orleans, but more self-consciously. Although there are no explicit references to Katrina, there is an underlying tendency to refer to things that are absent or to address New Orleans as a troubled site that needs some care and attention. Deborah Luster’s vintage-looking grid of rich black and white photos show sites where recent murders have taken place. Skylar Fein’s American black flags communicate a kind of economic desperation with catchy retail discount slogans lining the stripes. Bruce Davenport’s marker pen drawings of high school marching bands in formation, though joyful in the expressions of the figures and in the geometric color patterns that are created by their arrangement, recall groups and traditions that have dispersed since the flood. Courtney Egan’s elegant video projections of ephemeral flora and fauna paired with sculptural objects—a yellow trumpet flower complete with dripping sound and a dry vessel, for example—promise sensuality, but convey an uncanny absence. In contrast Gina Phillips’ narrative painting Salvage Operation, made with fabric, thread and feathers, is tactile, material and present.

Some pieces respond to Marfa as a site. Dawn Dedeaux’s illuminated Steps Home placed on a mostly empty lot, greeted us the night we drove into town, late and lost, from New York. Srdjan Loncar’s Fix-a-Thing pieces attend to small, broken moments in the Marfa landscape. Loncar molds missing parts, such as a railroad tie, from torn-up photographs he has made of the site, and installs them in situ. It is a gesture of kindness, but also of camouflaging, blending in. Dan Tague created metal texts for the courtyard, facing upward toward the bright sky, spelling out names of streets that no longer exist in New Orleans. The most discursive and immaterial piece in the show is Bons Enfants, spoken haikus in which students describe an eclectic array of New Orleans moments. Projected via an audio installation, this distillation of collective social experience transported from one site to another underscores what this show does best.

About as remote a place as one can get for a vital contemporary art destination, Marfa is a specific and complex site with its own curious negotiations between a local culture and an international art world. As such it is an apropos choice for an exhibition about place, whose task is a negotiation between margin and center. Though not an artwork itself, The World According to New Orleans operates as what James Meyer calls a “functional site,” as it generates new discursive spaces for the art, artists and place-ness of both New Orleans and Marfa. It is worth requoting here what Miwon Kwon has already quoted in her 1997 essay “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity”:

"[The functional site] is a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and discursive filiations and the bodies that move between them (the artist's above all). It is an informational site, a locus of overlap of text, photographs and video recordings, physical places and things.... It is a temporary thing; a movement; a chain of meanings devoid of a particular focus."

Although we may be nostalgic for the authenticity of the New Orleans that was, its new visibility and exchange of flows allow us to see the city as one of the "many dozens of potential art centers" that Cameron identified in the panel discussion as the current formation of the art world. Showing in Marfa is a first stop on the New Orleans artists’ transformation into contemporary-artists-as- globetrotters, and Marfa, though remote, delivers to the exhibition savvy art visitors from all over the globe. In an ideal world this nomadism and exposure will enable New Orleans as an art center without leveling its own potent cultural geography.

Rachel Stevens is an artist and writer based in New York City.

Isabella Court, Houston
Through May 15

By Wendy Vogel

Though the three artists currently showing in Houston’s Isabella Court galleries work in disparate mediums (painting, video and a variety of sculptural and photographic techniques), their practices can be linked through strategies of displacement, disorientation, excavation and reframing. Make sure to take a stroll along that stretch of Main Street before the weekend is through, as the three exhibitions close on Saturday.

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Jamal Cyrus
Bryan Miller Gallery
3907 Main Street

Cyrus’ second show at the newly rechristened Bryan Miller Gallery (formerly CTRL) is titled DKONKR, a pidgin transcription of “the conqueror” that references African-American folklore legend John the Conqueror. Cyrus is also part of the Houston-based art collective Otabenga Jones & Associates, and like their work, DKONKR riffs on themes of revolution, violence, social upheaval and the African diaspora, using found images as a point of departure.

In the back of the gallery, four sheets of papyrus titled Eroding Witness bear the laser-cut imprint of declassified, redacted FBI documents that detail the government’s shadowing of the Black Panther party in the 1960s. The delicate sheets, evocative of Biblical screeds, transform the evidentiary quality of the documents into an object that suggests a transhistorical narrative of oppression and resistance. This thread is followed in photographic objects with a strong tie to Warhol’s Death and Disaster series. An untitled black-and-white photo of the Black Panther party headquarters, splashed with catalogue numbers from King Tut’s tomb, is overlaid with deep blue Mylar tape. A photograph from the recent Egyptian uprising, printed in black-and-white, becomes the background to a makeshift roadblock (complete with sandbags) in FA / TA / HA.

Though many other artists have mined Warhol’s image-making strategies, Cyrus’ rigorous and imaginative take resists the facile implications of, for example, Kelley Walker’s chocolate-splashed Black Star Press.

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Linda Post
Art Palace
3913 Main Street

Linda Post’s solo effort at Art Palace is a spatial exercise; she reconfigures earlier site-specific work while creating new videos that unsettle the viewer’s experience in the gallery space. A highlight of the first category is Approach, first created for the AC Institute in New York. At Art Palace, the work is installed on two small flat-screen monitors in the back right corner. We see Post performing simple acts of preparation in the AC space on the left screen (mopping the floors and so on), while on the right, shots of an exterior elevator are intercut with footage of Post and a performer using the long, narrow art space as a makeshift bowling alley. Rather than distorting one’s spatial perception, references to 1970s performances abound, from Nauman’s phenomenological investigations of the corridor space to Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ maintenance actions.

Wherever and Not use Art Palace as a location to stage simple actions such as stacking blocks, rolling a ball or climbing a stool. Focusing on the blinding white of the gallery’s floors and walls, the videos both reference the specificity of the gallery architecture and gently deride the supposed neutrality of the art setting. There is Post’s sculptural quasi-monument, pushing the show in an anarchitectural direction. She reframes Houston’s Buffalo Bayou as three separate vignettes, chopped up and playing on three tube televisions precariously balanced upon one another. Repurposing obsolescent technology as an object of study, the work references both a “wherever” and “whenever” that ties her work to a larger history of intermedia experimentation.

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Kristin Musgnug
Inman Gallery
3917 Main Street

Kristin Musgnug, Japanese Dodder with Zuo Gui Wan, 2009, Oil on panel, 24 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

I recently saw Veins in the Gulf at Aurora Picture Show as part of Shrimp Boat Projects’ satellite programming. The documentary explicates the complicated options to slow or reverse the erosion of coastal wetlands in Louisiana, along with the divisive opinions of locals about these potential solutions. With that backdrop in mind, I went to Inman to check out Kristin Musgnug’s Unnatural Histories, a series of landscape paintings documenting the proliferation of invasive plant species in various locations in the U.S. These alien plants, introduced by humans, are slowly destroying local ecosystems.

Musgnug’s paintings, described by the artist as “detailed but not photographic; observationally based, but not completely objective,” are worthwhile provocations but do not always succeed on the level of critical reception. These paintings mimic 17th-century landscape conventions and are meant to convey that nature is always framed through pictorial conventions that structure our perception of reality. The problem is that her works try to ride the line between criticality and complicity. By depicting invasive plant species without some reference beyond the pastoral frame, she does little more than reinscribe representational traditions. In other words, many of the landscapes look impressive, but without a specialist’s knowledge of how dangerous the plants are, they don’t urge us to seek additional, politicized information (which Musgnug has provided amply, in the form of extended wall label-like texts available for the taking about the plants and their histories). These works fall into the trap of Ansel Adams’ photographs, which arguably often excise the social landscape for an aestheticized one.

The paintings that work in the built environment (Tallow Trees and Power Lines, 2010, and Japanese Dodder with Zuo Gui Wan, 2009) break from these traditions in a refreshing way. By the “staged” insertion of takeaway food containers, or through the rendering of faraway power lines in shaky skeins of paint, Musgnug points to the difficulty of reconciling contemporary motifs with pristine painterly motifs, much like the difficulty of introducing alien plants to a fragile ecosystem.

Wendy Vogel is Editor of ...might be good.

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