[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.

EJ Hauser Reclaims the Natural and Technological Aesthetics of Language in 'Song of Summer' @ Haverkampf Leistenschneider in Berlin

 
 

Most of us are so used to reading that we forget that each letter is a shape and each word is a composition. The type we read every day–in emails and books, on packaging and signs–has a significant aesthetic dimension. U.S. artist EJ Hauser has adopted graphic and typographic strategies for their philosophical purposes and works, revealing a new view of what we no longer see in everyday life among all the texts. EJ Hauser’s quasi-abstract, fabric-like paintings are composed of layers of pixels, text fragments, and chimerical figures that refer to networks both in nature and the plant world, as well as to digital systems and interconnections in our human communication world. For them, letters form a sculptural framework, a compositional structure that sometimes dissolves into pure text images, sometimes leads to text in combination with images, or sometimes is buried under successive layers of paint. Some are very explicit, others require a closer look to find the spine and curves of different letters jumbled together to dissolve the boundary between word and image, mixed with chimerical figures and totemic symbols representing the interconnectedness of life on earth. EJ Hauser is interested in the Wood Wide Web, the complex subterranean web on the planet. Plant communication takes place via the mycelium, a network of microscopic fungi beneath the forest floor, through which information is exchanged. This is not unlike the way we are connected today through our cell phones, social media, and the “invisible” Internet.

Song of Summer is on view through October 14th at Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Mommsenstraße 67, 10629 Berlin.

Frank Bowling @ Tate Britain in London

Frank Bowling’s first major retrospective at the Tate Britain offers the chance to experience work created throughout all six decades of the artist’s career. Bowling has relentlessly explored the properties and possibilities of paint, experimenting with staining, pouring, layering, as well as a variety of materials. The exhibition includes paintings from his respectively more personal and abstract series in which Bowling has investigated the tension between geometry and fluidity. At 85 years-old, the artist continues to paint everyday creating work that relies on technical skill while embracing change and the unpredictable.

Frank Bowling is on view through August 26 at Tate Britain Millbank, Westminster, London. photographs courtesy of Tate Britain