Ross Taylor: The Reimaginator

Ekphrasis. For those unfamiliar with the term, it is an ancient Greek word for description, one primarily offered as a work of art. At its simplest, it is synthesis, the capacity to capture the tone, nuance, and emotion of language, written or spoken, in a single image, or suite of works. In photography, we’d speak of capturing the moment. In painting, while we do not often use the word, we’ve seen and know the experience: outstretched hands, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, capturing Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, or, from another perspective, Kara Walker’s Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. The story spurs the interpretation. The work that results? Its reanimation.

This capacity to bring language alive is what defines Ross Taylor’s subtle and sublime paintings. Working from a single source for inspiration, poet Denise Levertov’s Losing Track, Taylor creates works which both respond to and extend beyond the heartfelt and heartbroken spaces she imagines. His close reading serves as a springboard, each line unraveled to reveal itself more fully as an image. “You come close to the shore…and nudge me awake,” she suggests, to which Taylor responds, “These lines…beautifully align with the kind of tension I strive for in each composition.” And do they ever.

Nudge (a brief encounter) invites viewers into a liminal space, one between the optimism of trees in the foreground that reach for the sky, and their silhouetted counterparts, pushing toward a black shape on the horizon. Perhaps this is Taylor’s nod to Levertov’s “mud sucking at gray and black.” This indeterminacy becomes arresting. Taylor’s palette is a combination of the luminescence of Der Blaue Reiter with the more restrained tones of American impressionism. There’s the steel blue of Ruckle, and Rally but all too briefly, those reds that hover between coral and. Vermilion in Moon Bay.

And let’s not lose sight of the power inherent in Taylor’s reimagination. This is not some trite exploration of mnemonics, not some nod to ROYGBV. This is a heartrending tale of loss, lack, and longing, a chronicle of resignation. Losing Track is merely the map, Taylor’s works its shattered stops along the way: “a boat adrift,” “tide swings you away.” Then, nothing. “I know I’m alone again.” There’s a bare and barren tree pushing forward on the canvas from Every time I heard your name I was thinking out loud, Taylor’s pause to reflect on our seasons, our “timbers of me.”

Yet Taylor strives soften longing’s blow. Losing Track ends in potential, “a light growth of green dreams drying,” not dying, and in this green we see life begin its persistent flow forward. Understorey, anchored in distinctions between, as Taylor describes, “above and below,” is equally as optimistic as it is resigned. We end with potential, just as Levertov’s work begins from a sense of longing, of absence, and ends with the notion of potential rebirth. Taylor has walked us along a path, or, rather guided us in a vessel through choppy waters, only to arrive back on dry ground. Landed, but not stranded, as a “pier half-in-half-out of water.” Always already both one thing and its other.

Ross Taylor: The Reimaginator was first published by Scott Miller Projects

Cecilia Vissers: The Ocean Path

At first glance, you won’t see the vast spaces Cecilia Vissers’ works reveal. Voe. Inlet. Bay. Fjord. Each a small word that encompasses an almost unimaginable scale.  This potential—to distill a feeling of expansion into the confines of an intimate space—is one of the key challenges of art, whether material or conceptual. In literature, creating space comes easily, from the phantasmagorical in magical realism to the pragmatic in philosophical parables. Sculpture begins by pushing against its always-already defined materiality, with its inherent limitations. Its challenge? To transform apparition of the physical into exploration of something more. Few contemporary artists consistently bring this opposition into clarity more fully and more enigmatically than Cecilia Vissers.

 A sculptor and photographer, Vissers uses her unique approaches to representation to both map a place and to push beyond its limits. In The Ocean Path, Vissers makes works be her markers, like directions on a path that point travelers in an intended direction. Even while reducing her subjects to some of their simplest—yet most recognizable—elements, Vissers finds distinction and variation in composition, color, and form. As she explains, “I do a lot of work in series and editions, still, it’s impossible to make an exact copy of a work.” Add in that she sees herself as a sculptor rather than, for example, a painter, and the differentiations between material (metal), subject (the ocean, fjords, water, and the like) become more stunning, and more stark. 

And more beautiful. In some ways, her sculptures track the familiar, pulsing with energy and motion. One wave, a sawtooth; another, a sine. It isn’t so much that Vissers vocalizes these terms as it is that in her works we see concrete examples of each. Vissers uses the language of abstraction in some sense reverentially, allowing the fundamental laws of nature to exist and to persist within and through her compositions. She’s not denying these fundamental principles; she’s just not demanding we know them. Examine Stromness Voe, Dales Voe, Whiteness Voe, Voe of Sound, for example, and you’ll see waves that are inverted, opposite, and complimentary, each a deep hue of purple suggestive of the aurora borealis. Having spend time in the Shetlands, Visser is familiar with this natural phenomenon, its colors formed in part by the presence of nitrogen which radiates: purple. This inherent doubling makes Vissers sculptures even more sublime. Whether waves on water or in the sky, on the wall each is both one and the other at precisely the same time.

Her black-and-white photographs extend this exploration, bringing her focus on shape and wave onto land. In The Ripple Stone, Fetlar, Shetland Islands, 2023, that same triangle wave present in her sculptures is now made manifest in shape and form. Set against a descending foreground and flat horizon, the stone—one of many standing stones in the Shetlands and Orkneys—is almost alive, its history mapped in the moss on its surface. Look closely, and the stone is even more revelatory. Vissers’ image captures what looks like a skull, at the left center, and a human-like shape rising above. It is as if she has found the natural successor to Holbein and Rodin, an object so metaphorical that its messages are made concrete.

In many ways, Vissers’ photographs are the natural extensions to her sculptures. The latter minimal, restrained, sequential; the former composed, yet evocative of the wildness she has so deftly distilled in aluminium. These come the closest to intersecting in Hermaness, Unst, Shetland Islands, 2023, in which the bright light on a hillside emerges as shape, form, site, and substance. While Vissers has shared her admiration for and conceptual dialogues with artists including Ellsworth Kelly and Ted Stamm, her photographs are equally an extension of artists like Robert Smithson in how they redefine and reinterpret both history and distance, presence and absence.

What she really asks is that viewers define their expectations of portraiture. Is it fragmentary and evocative, as are her sculptures, or is it more holistic and seemingly accessible, as are her photographs. Either way, she beckons viewers to join her explorations and perambulations. In his Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau describes the experience of being lifted out of the city as he ascends one of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. In The Ocean Path, Vissers extends our experience horizontally, pushing us onto and over the waves, up and along the footpaths, past the material and the ephemeral, with no requirement that we follow a distinct path — and the distinct expectation that we can, and will, diverge. Her path is chronicled in images of the Shetlands; yours is mapped in every moment you see and feel the shapes and stories she shares.

Ronnie Van Hout's Quiet Horror

Memories are notoriously imperfect, and few more so than mine. This could best be illustrated by the fact that for years I misremembered Robert Storr’s essay “Richard Tuttle: Just Exquisite” as “Richard Tuttle: Just Pathetic.” Fixated on the idea of patheticism, and the perception that Tuttle fell somewhere therein, I was convinced that Storr had written this essay. It turns out that somehow, however convoluted, I was wrong — dead wrong — and right at the same time. Turns out it wasn’t Storr, or even Tuttle. But there was something Just Pathetic. 

It is 1990, and in the Los Angeles Times reviewer and critic Christopher Knight is writing about the farewell show for Rosamund Felsen Gallery’s N. La Cienega Boulevard Space. The exhibition? “Just Pathetic," organized by Ralph Rugoff. Knight writes, 

Patheticism chronicles the mundane, seemingly trivial events of ordinary lives, but it refuses to champion a populist ideal. In fact, Pathetic art is adamantly anti-idealistic, because mass culture feeds on the propagation of idealized images. Rather than envisioning utopias--yours, mine or theirs--Patheticism simply makes do with what is. And “what is” is frequently a mess. It embraces all those quietly horrific feelings one has gone to great if unwitting lengths to repress from memory. Patheticism’s virtue is in transforming grinding aggravations into small pleasures, and small pleasures into big ones. Finally, a worthwhile movement to get behind for the 1990s.

Almost thirty years later, little has changed. As Knight put it, and how right he was, patheticism makes do with what is, and what is indeed is frequently a mess. I keep thinking about this mess because artists like New Zealand’s Ronnie Van Hout keep thumbing his nose at us, and poking us in the eye at precisely the same time. His arch reinterpretation of this quasi-dumbed down aesthetic makes for a subtly sophisticated, incredibly complex critique of the banality of the art market’s endless commodification and a commentary on the vapidity of the art world itself. All the while the punters, the viewers, the random passers-by, get incensed by the fact that someone like Van Hout can be seriously by those same people and institutions, becoming apoplectic at his refusal to do better.

What’s so great about Ronnie, and I’ll use his first name since we’re on a first-name basis, is that for years he simply hasn’t given a shit. Content to make what he likes, with the belief that eventually the critical, conceptual, commercial and common worlds might converge, or catch up, he simply forged ahead.

You don’t have to actually look up at the roof of City Gallery, Wellington, or see one of its endless reproductions, to know that Ronnie’s been teasing Quasi for a long time — any of his earlier autobiographical sculptures will take you there. Maybe more interesting is the idea that we turn to the pathetic, to the idea of just making do, just getting by, when more traditional notions of the beautiful fail. Antipodean exceptionalism has always been its own special creation in any event.  That’s what a work like Quasi embodies. Today, patheticism has run its course. But maybe, just maybe, this is its twenty-first century equivalent — in Knight’s words, “quietly horrific” and full of “small pleasures”. Yes, indeed.

Alan Skees: A Glitch in Time

For his exhibition American Glitch, on view through March 8 at the University of Montevallo's Bloch Art Gallery, Alan Skees revisited the slit scan, that photographic technique beloved by creators and directors fascinated with filmically altering images in the perceived field. Skees does this through using an app, and digital manipulation, which allow him to capture a vast amount of information. He then compiles new images from specific sets of pixels as if he were slicing and reassembling a sheet of paper. Like a bastardization of Étienne-Jules Marey via Muybridge, Skees reconstructs everything from urban sprawl, spartan streetscapes, and vast tracts of the seemingly endless agricultural desolation of middle America, making everything stutter and jump in the process.

At his best, Skees creates pseudoabstractions that push these digital manipulations toward the realm of second-generation color field paintings. In particular, his Hampton Road Bridge-Tunnel works feel like the unexpected, technical successors to the painterly quietude of Morris Louis. Finding comfortable visuals within these masses of fragments is challenging, and the fact that Skees pursues this approach in opposition to the pastoral of the American Regionalists should be lauded. In an age in which our understandings of both the 'natural' and the 'real' are strained at best, the notion of shattering their representations in advance seems doubly ironic. 

Alan Skees, American Glitch: Neo Regionalism - Highways - I-459 - Alabama 2 (2017), 36 x 12 inches, digital slit-scan ink jet print

At Play in the Field of Dreams

Devouring David Levinthal’s Playland, on view recently at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, was like overeating at an unlimited buffet. You were reasonably sure you should stop, but you were just not sure quite when. What made the exhibition so difficult to situate was that it was, like any exhibition that focused predominantly on works from a single gift, both enhanced and limited by what was contained therein: 40 of 59 works recently obtained from an anonymous donor, as well as an additional 6 pieces drawn from three Birmingham collections. Why the additional works were necessary is unclear, but—coming from Levinthal’s Baseball series—they added elements of accessibility and familiarity. 

The exhibition filled all of AEIVA. In the smallest gallery were nine images from Wild West, Levinthal’s ongoing series that explores notions of American expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the historical subjugation of Native Americans. Using a wild, white horse as its key image (I couldn’t decide here if the better soundtrack would be Michael Martin Murphey’s Wildfire or Peter Rowan’s Free Mexican Air Force—“Mescalito riding a white horse”), Wild West was a soft, shallow depth-of-field gallop through an unspecified expansionist history. What this highlighted, from the outset, was the sheer evocative power of the toys Levinthal photographs, which are themselves bounded by the limits of their own meaning. While both the wall text and contemporary cultural criticism may call into question the appropriateness of using “Cowboys and Indians”, either the terms or the toys, when situated within their historical frame these images become manifestations of both adolescent white male Hollywood fantasy from mid-century and a nostalgic comment on how far culture has come. In some ways, this critical doubling is the shadow that haunts the entire exhibition.  

In the adjacent gallery, four works from American Beauties vied with nine pieces from the Barbie series in an attempt to determine how best to negotiate the often problematic and stereotypical representations of women. One look at the voluptuousness of a work from American Beauties, and viewers stepped into a vaseline-coated land of blurry desire, constructed from plastic depictions of feminine perfection. Barbie, on the contrary, is a study in representing aspirational womanhood after the fact—forcing viewers to wonder just what the true questions are. In context, American Beauties and Barbie did not set up the tried and tired representational dichotomy of virgin/whore, but arguably instead one of idealized versus homogenized. In both instances, the issue was that neither had a voice: both Barbie and American Beauties are constructed representations, not unsympathetically, of the issues that are being explored. But, in looking at both, I was reminded of a piece from another series, Desire (1992-1992). The late advertising impresario Jay Chiat, having seen a work from that series, mistook it for a photograph of his then wife. 

Untitled, from the series American Beauties (1989-1990), 20 x 24 Polaroid Polacolor Print

Apart from American Beauties and Barbie, the center gallery also included six works from the Baseball series, including three identifiable individuals who viewers could regard as archetypes: Sandy Koufax, the Orthodox Jew who refused to pitch Game One of the ’65 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur; Yogi Berra, arguably the Buddha of Baseball, who somehow transformed Italian working-class idealism into all-American heroism; and Jackie Robinson, “42”, who suffered for the sport over the course of his titanic and transformational quest to integrate Major League Baseball. Unusually it seems, unlike these stars, Levinthal’s women inhabit predominantly unidentifiable spaces, whether the dark confines of 1950s-style mens-magazines, or the ultimately plastic surrealism of a toy universe, while the men inhabit the specific confines of history. Whether these distinctions are intentional is unclear; but somehow there is a troubling oscillation between trope and triumph.

The third gallery contains works from two more series: four works from Passion, and ten from Mein Kampf. In one work from Passion, a saint stands hands outstretched, palms up, eyes downward; it is a mirror opposite of the image of Yogi Berra, who in the preceding room stood arms outstretched, eyes gazing toward the heavens, hoping to catch a wayward pop foul. The inference that sportis religion can’t be overlooked, although given the exhibition’s installation it is not readily evident. Instead, Passionand Mein Kampf engage in a discourse of good and evil, although in fact, they don’t really engage much at all. The more intriguing connection seems to be between the women of American Beauties, and the abject horror of the naked women in Levinthal’s concentration camp images—the similarities being so subtle that one wonders if a doll from the former series appears in the latter. 

Recognizability, familiarity, and accessibility are all qualities that Playland compels. But somehow, it feels as if—in today's contemporary context—some of the larger issues being addressed are trapped within the frame: when Yogi Berra reaches for the stars, for example, I was reminded of Robert Redford in The Natural; while American Beauties challenges ideas of feminine beauty, many contemporary college-age visitors are just on the cusp of being too young to remember Anna Nicole Smith, much less Jayne Mansfield, and somehow the images don’t suggest a Kardashian. So maybe the problem is that, in its totality, Playland makes each series have difficulty situating its specific voice. Each is always in danger of being overwhelmed by the next. There are too many ideas being explored, too many issues being addressed, to truly situate the exhibition. This is a challenge with any survey exhibition, particularly when the similarities between the visual language the artist uses means that each image has to be approached carefully, examined thoughtfully, and considered fully. Given the demands that such requirements place on even the most informed museum visitors, perhaps a David Levinthal series is better experienced in moderation, like fine wine: sampled, critiqued, and then . . . the choice is yours.