[REVIEW] Nurturing Nature in Lost Wild: Art on the Edge of the Anthropocene @ Whitney Modern in Los Gatos

text by Chimera Mohammadi

How do we nurture the force that created us? This seemingly paradoxical question defines Lost Wild, the group show on view at the Whitney Modern in Los Gatos. The show grapples with various such paradoxes tethered to our relationship with nature: Keith Petersen’s breathtaking photography of chemical reactions claims organic aesthetics through inorganic means, and Karen Olsen-Dunn’s otherwise conventional landscapes glitch and freeze off the canvas and out of the realm of recognition. Dean Bensen and Demetra Theofanous’s glass leaves and bird nests solidify typically flexible structures into embodied fragility, reminiscent of the environmental precariousness that defines our current global epoch. After luxuriating in these contradictory states, the show sets about to address that core question of nurturing, calling in motifs of youth, restoration, and lushness. Melissa Mohammadi’s sprawling botanical studies and tunnel books house disparate plants, bound together by unlikely familial forces and working together toward healing. Tamera Avery’s tenderly rendered masked subjects are at once children and revolutionaries, often modeled after her own son. Marie Cameron’s paintings cope with climate change through a fantastical fairy tale lens, while Sheila Metcalf Tobin’s burst out of the confines of the canvas in radiant, sun-dappled celebrations of natural nostalgia.

Lost Wild is on view through March 30th at Whitney Modern, 2nd Floor of 24 N Santa Cruz Ave 2nd floor, Los Gatos, CA 95030.

14 Artists Question the Possibility of Human Benevolence & Ecology in Ce que nous donne la terre @ Afikaris in Paris

text by Barbara Norton

Much like nature itself, Ce que nous donne la terre (What the earth Gives Us) is an exhibition comprised of many disparate parts: resin, beads, and acrylic are to the show what beetles, silt, and chlorophyll are to our natural world. Also like the natural world, Ce que nous donne la terre is undeniably united. With fourteen different works on view, each artist challenges what it is to be a human who is both part of that precious, quivering equilibrium of the Earth and a disruptor of it.

While the human is centered throughout the show, we are always in our most early context—nature. In doing so, the relationship between us and world is reimagined countless times, a testament to its eternal loamy dynamism. In Beya Gille Gacha’s haunting Lady Mirror, a blue Mother Nature bathes in black water and algae. She is tranquil, but perhaps not kind—humid anger billows from her like steam from a bath. Though she is a humanoid figure, her lapis lazuli-colored skin is jarring and unnatural against the dirty porcelain.

A blue-bodied figure also appears in Omar Mahfoudi’s Hidden behind the sun. Shielding his visage from the violent, lone smear of sunlight, Mahfoudi’s blue man is blurry with cool, wet anguish beneath the red-yellow light. 

The people of L’Eden are—perhaps—more at peace with their world. Blending into the foliage entirely, their jewelry, clothing, and hair are the only denotation of where the leaves end and their bodies begin. Maybe they have returned to the earliest beginning among the lush, green leaves. But there is also a more sinister possibility: are the figures making a return to their roots, or are they trapped behind the rapidly encroaching leaves? Will the foliage continue to grow and twist across the canvas until it blots them out entirely? 

This tenuous relationship winds itself through each work in Ce que nous donne la terre, on view through 23rd September at AFIKARIS Gallery. What is our place in a world where we are both the product and demise of natural creation?   


Ce que nous dans la terre is on view through 23rd September at AFIKARIS Gallery 7 Rue Notre Dame de Nazareth.

Moffat Takadiwa: Son of the Soil @ Nicodim In Los Angeles

Son of the Soil is Moffat Takadiwa’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Takadiwa reassesses his own Korekore craft culture through the appropriation of garbage from the West, elevating found objects into sculptural forms that engage with issues of cultural identity, language, social practice, and the environment. All of his artworks are composed from the discarded remains of consumer waste, woven together in the language of traditional Zimbabwean textiles. Macrobiotic in his approach to material, his repurposed objects tell stories of each piece’s past lives to viewers brave enough to confront their own ecological and colonial legacies. Son of the Soil is on view through October 19 at Nicodim 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock and courtesy of Nicodim

Clifford Ross's Digital Waves @ "COAL+ICE" In San Francisco

 

Free and open to the public, COAL + ICE visually traces the trajectory of climate change — from coal mines and the burning of fossil fuels to the melting Himalayan glaciers, rising sea level and  extreme weather events — bringing the environmental and human costs of man‐made climate change to life through images, videos and thought‐provoking events. The exhibition is on view through September 23 at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture 2 Marina Boulevard, San Francisco.