Open Air at The Nave Gallery in Somerville MA.
Artists:
Matthew Best
Nathalie Miebach
Carolyn Muskat
Ted Ollier
Jason Shoemaker
These five artists use the outdoors as inspiration without relying on the timeworn landscape tradition. Each has his/her own way of dealing with the outdoors. A quick description of each project:
Matthew Best's 2+ year suburban foraging project is a visual diary centered around food, life, death, and our insufficient attention to these concerns. Rejecting the clinical delivery of fruit and foods from around the globe, he restores the dependence on our immediate surroundings for nourishment.
Nathalie Miebach's sculptures weave together literal meteorological storms and personal emotional storms. These objects attach the external chaos surrounding us with our internal emotions. These are further developed by collaborating with the accomplished Elaine Rombola to create musical scores out of these storms.
Carolyn Muskat's sculptures revolve around the idea of top soil and ground cover. Buried below the ground we see is our history. Creating granular constructions from her own history she explores geological dimensions, humanizing the process and producing new ways of understanding old tropes.
Ted Ollier's photographs trick us into thinking that he has created a "zen like" calligraphic scroll. Instead, the asphalt patches in the road are brought to our attention in such a quiet and sly way that it is shocking to earnestly find meaning in such a humble object.
Jason Shoemaker's large narrative print of flying objects escaping the manufactured city fits in well with his allegories of roosting birds. These symbolic creatures move out into the wind, finding new roosts. Oddly, at the far end from the large and complicated city we find the impossible-- a man sitting on a horse that is standing in a boat.
Taken together, these works introduce original interpretations of the outdoors. Neither relying on outdated aesthetically motivated images of bucolic scenes nor currently stylish politically motivated "green" readings of our world they form a new modality in the landscape genre.
Each has found a new focal point that guides their work. Miebach, Best, and Ollier's work relies on some form of scientific method; primarily gathering data. Of course, the gathered data is used in divergent ways. Miebach's explosions of color and structured form demand a short book like 1971's Entropy and Art (PDF copy at link) by Arnheim. Her sculptures enthrall the viewer and reward continued study but escape simple explanations.
In contrast with Miebach, Best uses his data as object. Forming a hermeneutic circle, without the individual information from each day, the project is restricted and without understanding the end goal, any individual page is not intelligible. The viewer who possesses both the end goal and the details can project themselves into the project.
Ollier's photographs capture everyday objects from an impossibly impartial perspective. He illustrates his ideas with objective systems, and relies on these systems to provide the images for each piece. Even though he goes through a rigorously concrete process, the final images retreat from what could be entirely too literal and boring.
Shoemaker and Muskat both have overarching themes that strays into the allegorical. In Shoemaker's case, he seems to challenge his own world view with this print. It would be easy to read the work as a indictment of urban sprawl encroaching on the natural world, but his careful and sensitive depiction of both the city and birds who escape it should be read differently. Seen in his wider oeuvre, these birds need a place to rest and the city is where they return to at the end of the day.
Last, Muskat's two sculptures come from her long-standing exploration of the earth under our feet. She sees the top soil as the current chapter in world history. Beneath us, no matter where we stand are buried histories, with boundless narratives and connections. The way our life builds up is similar to how geologic formation are created, for example: from explosions, from wear, or from exposure to hardships. As we excavate the earth, we can do the same for our own self, and unearth hidden pains and triumphs.
In the end, these five artists are creating works that are part of wider dialog about who we are and what our surroundings say about us. From Anne Hamilton's explorations of site specificity, Kader Attia's questioning of location, to Fallen Fruit's various projects centering on fruit-- Open Air's artists may be creating new and previously unseen works, but they are also taking part in a wider conversation currently playing out in art today.
For some pictures see my Flickr.
