CV
ABOUT
Riding through the Yukon plateau, the swamps of the river dried through to the bone and opened up to burned-out forests. The piles of matchstick trees, blackened and silver, looked intentionally placed, composed and positioned as the remnant of an exhausted logging stand would be. A fox, emaciated and panting in the heat, ran out to the road to meet us and glistened, sweating and starving in the shadowless sun like an apparition.
We pushed on to seek a place to sleep for the night and pulled over to the bank of a tributary. The place was good, hidden between the tall brush of the gravel bar littered with caribou tracks and the black asphalt of the highway, the smallest ribbon in the wake of raw wilderness. We walked out toward the gravel to find water access. In the confused rushing of the silty river, the thinness of the fire-wrecked trees, and the density of the new willows, a bear that couldn’t hear us coming rose on its haunches, rearing to full height. Making eye contact with it in the split moments before it charged sent a wave of adrenaline into my bones that made me sense the air in a way I never have and I could taste the smoke.
The shit pile is the most prolific source of all creative origin: The places where things ferment and fester are where the impulses to generate emerge, as chemical reaction of enzymatic breakdown. Look to the ground and to the manure.
Life must come first and the resulting work the broken down, dissolved, absorbed remains of that which is exalted, horrifying, unrecognizable, mutilated, and becoming a new entity containing its own life essence.
The work must exude the fumes, fluids, and brittle shrapnel of the life that came before it, which allowed your mind to stretch and warp around the image in the first place.
If you aren’t seeking out enough life to saturate the image, you will shrivel in the intellect.
Symbol is only universal to a haphazard degree. You are reflected in every single painting whether you know it or not. Figure it out later.
Shame is the greatest enemy
Honesty is the only antidote capable of the ruthless brutality needed to remedy shame
The imagination is often the only legitimate and worthy conduit to honesty because it resolves to resolute unabashedness and cannot be corralled
But, it can be quashed, and remember it and conceive of it a small and ancient organ, or a false pregnancy, inside yourself- pressing on it is like activating a gland, it is fragile and covered with a delicate skin, it requires certain and particular sustenance, it can be neglected and atrophy but since it is prehistoric and the body has evolved beyond absolute need for it, you can survive without it though you can never generate it again.
On a similar note, within rage you can decide to see for yourself and decide for yourself. Look at things that repel, scare, arouse, and revolt you.
Light is everything; on the physical surface, paint with it by obscuring, preserving, revealing, reflecting, mimicking. Then, in the conceptual surface, light can combust and destroy, reveal ruthlessly, blind to the point of concealment, deflect, produce tricks and illusions, bring revelatory spirits and visions, or wound and flood.
There are things you cannot do and cannot be; in the painting the loneliness of this becomes a beacon.
However, the meditation of complete presence and being in a real place, in a real world with feet on the ground and resisting against gravity, soil, water, wind, and heat, is the center of the illumination. Maintain firm and immediate contact and stare hard because beyond the mortality of that moment the painting can only be a window.
On the surface and in your mind be ferocious about everything, in your calculation, introspection, adoration, criticism, nitpicking, pleading, devotion, and crisis.
Rage Digest Transmutate Worship Refuse Listen Walk Bite Insist and Stare.
The Eco-apocalyptic Sublime: The Contemporary Overwhelming of the Senses
Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757, investigates the quintessential facets of the Romantic and Gothic movements of the early to mid 19th century. Painters like Caspar David Freidrich, J.M.W. Turner, and Francisco Goya described the awe-inspiring splendor of the natural world with mythological references and attributions to divine providence and might. Incessant storms, raging fires, and infallible mountain ranges dominated their scenes, evoking the uncontrollable and extreme. Burke’s proposition that the true nature of the sublime is in the ‘delightful horror’ of its experience, exposing the eye to extreme vastness, lightness, or height. A sense of the infinite and perpetually expanding is key to the sensation of the sublime; the viewer must grapple with a reality so wide and challenging that it ceases to be real, simply too great in its intensity to process. The true goal of the sublime is portraying the furthest reaches of the conscious mind, usually symbolic of death or rebirth- in short, an apocalypse. As an empiricist, it is only natural that Edmund Burke would compose his theories on the conviction that our ideas and conceptualizations are determined by our senses, asserting that to know, one must first feel. Burke writes in A Philosophical Enquiry that “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling… The passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror”. Elaborating upon the infinite as the “truest test of the sublime”, requiring a fear-inspiring uncertainty to be felt viscerally, Burke denotes that in producing art, even when figurative in objective nature, is a method of seeking out the inherent obscurity of representation and reveling in the incongruence of the incomprehensible that it produces.
Rising out of a social discontent and following the aftermath of the French Revolution, the early Romantics were painting in a time of social upheaval that resembles a small apocalypse; Kathryn Calley Galitz writes that “nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought”. Increased references to myth and the animal kingdom allowed European painters to identify with a force larger than themselves, a sort of disseminate experiment in pathos as opposed to rigid logos. The seeds sown with this progression into the ungovernable and turbulent have developed into the contemporary push and pull of the external and internal chaos. In an age of hyper-consumerism, torrential and highly targeted information, and extreme visual stimuli at a consistent level, we are bombarded with imagery. Accelerated access to the visual, through advertisement, news, media entertainment, and the hand-held camera has resulted in a desensitization to visual perception. In Susan Sontag’s 2004 Regarding the Pain of Others, she asserts that “Photographs tend to transform, whatever their subject; and as an image something may be beautiful – or terrifying, or unbearable, or quite bearable – as it is not in real life… Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown. Uglifying, showing something at its worst, is a more modern function: didactic, it invites an active response. For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock.” (Sontag 2004:72). As such, the sublime is activated by virtue at marveling at the unfathomable. The contemporary sublime in relation to environmental crises is simultaneously elevated and hindered by the medium of the photograph.
Artists such as Edward Burtynsky (b. 1955) and Sebastião Salgado (b. 1944) utilize a documentarian approach to reflecting the honest condition of the natural. Salgado’s sprawling black and white images compounded in Genesis become too large to bear. Burtynsky writes that “our planet has borne witness to five great extinction events, and these have been prompted by a variety of causes: a colossal meteor impact, massive volcanic eruptions, and oceanic cyanobacteria activity that generated a deadly toxicity in the atmosphere. These were the naturally occurring phenomena governing life’s ebb and flow. Now it is becoming clear that humankind, with its population explosion, industry, and technology, has in a very short period of time also become an agent of immense global change”. Where the apocalyptic end was once an imaginative pursuit to devise, complete with trumpeter angels boiling oceans and tormenting the earth with swarms of locusts as described in the Book of Revelations, we are living in a time when we can foresee an imminent end in data and aerial photography. The works of Burtynsky are paradoxical in effect. From a bird's eye perspective, the multicolored, kaleidoscopic scars of extraction and the radial diffraction of solar plants in the desert replicate an abstract and psychedelic experience that signify the sublime: impossible to understand, awe-inspiring, and too large for comfort. In Ecocriticism, Greg Garrard writes that “...apocalypticism is inevitably bound up with imagination, because it has yet to come into being… and if, sociologically, it is a ‘genre born out of crisis’, it is also necessarily a rhetoric that must whip up such crises to proportions appropriate to the end of time. This dialectic in which apocalypticism both responds to and produces ‘crisis’ will be important to our evaluation of it as an ecocritical trope” (94). By employing maximal techniques, the widest lenses, and the brightest colors to assert a representation of the apocalyptic sublime, the artist is both gaining and losing the attention of the viewer.
Elliott Hundley (b. 1975) uses collage as a method of Doug Harvey, in Cut Up or Shut Up: The Unspeakable Narratives of Elliott Hundley, writes that “Collage’s imposed simultaneity of mutually exclusive simulations of the objective world not only proposes a radical resolution to the crisis of representational artmaking brought about by the advent of photography but mirrors a fundamental discontinuity at the heart of both the creative act and the human experience of reality- at least in the modern era, and possibly reaching back to the beginnings of human consciousness”. Referencing mythos in his series The Bacchae serves to illustrate the nature of his medium as emblematic of “...the androgynous god who comes from somewhere else, disrupting the unity of the cosmos, manifesting duality in the phenomenal world, abutting incongruous realities one against the other: collaging. He radically disorders the world in that it may reconfigure itself in a new equilibrium.” Auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, optical effects of combined overwhelming nature activate each of the senses by virtue of maximum compounding, a nearly war-mongering level of stimulation. Gearing the observer to process the maximum potential of impression resembles a sense of the apocalyptic, an inner process of the imagination that flanks the external reality. The opacity of the senses, marred by the current apocalyptic condition, are shocked into awakening, and a psychological experience of internalizing the visual mimics the psychedelic pursuit of total mystification. The religious experience of complete loss of self is referenced in Hundley’s The Bacchae. Dionysus, the god of inebriation in the sense of complete release of the self, is evoked to challenge and transcend.
99 x 289 1/4 x 19 inches (251.5 x 734.7 x 48.3 cm), 6 panels total
The definition of psychedelic references perception: “of or noting a mental state characterized by a profound sense of intensified sensory perception, sometimes accompanied by a severe perceptual distortion and hallucinations and by extreme feelings of either euphoria or despair”. The immersive projects of artist compounds like Meow Wolf and Alex and Allyson Grey’s long-developing Entheon are not dissimilar experiments in the construction of parallel realities, a creative planning for the very probable apocalypse, incidentally one that is attention-hijacking in nature. Bombarded with bad news, a largely desensitized majority seeks the incessant dopamine engine of news and social media, an ouroboros that resembles a self-fulfilling prophecy- the myth of Sisyphus whose mythological tragicomic honesty is salt in the wound. Julie Mehretu (b. 1970) creates what she dubs “story maps of no location”, a cartographic analysis of the most devastating events of our time. Investigating fields of saturated color, rippling lines, expanding grids, and projectile bursts with an almost architectural blueprint methodology, Mehretu tracks seismic shifts and destructions with elevated awareness. In an interview with Art 21, Mehretu describes an interest in Turner, saying that “...the seascape was his point of reference, and even when he was trying to paint historical scenes around that it was the sky and the atmosphere that he was painting. Being able to paint forces of this kind coming together and that you can’t quite grasp in some way is his majesty. But, with my work, it’s the architecture and the space and the built environment that become a kind of palimpsest, another type of atmosphere. The buildings are so layered; the information can be so layered and disintegrated that it becomes a dust-like atmosphere”. A sense of disembodied altitude pervades her work, looking on with a birds eye lens to the cosmic rifts of the modern age that we are unprepared to comprehend. The psychedelic and apocalyptic enter her paintings with tempestuous force.
Collection Nicolas and Jeanne Greenberg, New York
Troy Dugas (b. 1970) takes a similar approach to investigating the revelatory sublime with his Landscape series, writing that “The work is constructed from thousands of pieces of cut or shredded product labels, vintage ledgers, illustrated book pages, and most recently, painted and hand printed paper. Using repetition and intuition guided by original designs, I explore the infinite possibilities of radial form, symmetry, and pattern. Influences include the history of textiles, outsider art, and indigenous folk art. The perseverance, humbleness, and resourcefulness of the Acadian culture in which I live also has a deeply rooted influence on the work I make”. Finely organized images of the natural, repeated into seemingly infinite reaches, confuse and derail the senses. The world as we know it has ended; the field has expanded into reverberation, a field of color and suggested sensation that is enrapturing, opaque, intimidating, confusing, revitalizing, and unsettling. The apocalypse of the overwhelmed senses turn inward and paradoxically outward, pushing the representation of the natural world to the furthest reaches of our comprehension, just as in the works of Julie Mehretu and Elliott Hundley.
Courtesy of the artist and Craighead-Green, Dallas, Tex.
Bibliography
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1759. Scolar Press, 1970.
cube, White. “Artists - Julie Mehretu.” White Cube, whitecube.com/artists/artist/julie_mehretu/. Accessed 14 May 2023.
Dugas, Troy. “Archive.” Troy Dugas, www.troydugas.com/work#/new-page-16/. Accessed 14 May 2023.
“Elliott Hundley.” Regen Projects, www.regenprojects.com/artists/elliott-hundley?view=slider#24. Accessed 14 May 2023.
Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “Romanticism: Essay: The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.” The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, 1 Jan. 1AD, www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm#:~:text=Romanticism%2C%20first%20defined%20as%20an,and%20flourished%20until%20mid%2Dcentury.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. Routledge, 2023.
Harris, Melissa. “Sebastião Salgado at the International Center of Photography.” Aperture, 19 Sept. 2014, aperture.org/editorial/interview-sebastiao-salgado/.
“Photographs: Anthropocene.” Edward Burtynsky, www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/photographs/anthropocene. Accessed 14 May 2023.
Schlaegel, Andreas, et al. “The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100 Garage Museum of Contemporary Art / Moscow:” Flash Art, 13 Nov. 2019, flash---art.com/2019/11/the-coming-world-ecology-as-the-new-politics-2030-2100-garage-museum-of-contemporary-art-moscow/.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin Books, 2019.
White, Luke. “Damien Hirst’s Shark: Nature, Capitalism and the Sublime.” Tate, 1 Jan. 2013, www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/luke-white-damien-hirsts-shark-nature-capitalism-and-the-sublime-r1136828.