Nature
Curated by Joy Pepe
In Camille Eskell’s Tattooed Lady: Strange Fruit, we return to the truncated female torso discussed in BODY. Its innards are exposed as a colonic tangle of clustered pears and twisting snakes. The paint transforms into tattoos of leafy vines and fruit along the shoulders and thighs. The body of Eve and her eating of the fruit at the behest of the serpent in the Garden of Eden is invoked. Yet, the pear can also be a symbol of the Virgin Mary and its pairing with apples, as seen in the fifteenth-century paintings of Carlo Crivelli, reminds us of her miraculous fertility and her role as Queen of Heaven. Slice a pear in half and the seeds form a crown of stars. In Christian thought, Mary is the new Eve, who comes to redeem the latter’s sinfulness, so the ‘pairing’ of the fruit, plants, and reptiles of Eden joins the sinner and the savior. Still, the sculpture remains disturbing as her guts are eviscerated. A snake, elegantly swirling in the image by Lys Guillorn, can continue thoughts of Paradise, yet the title Thamnophis Glyph I (For Anna Perenna) tells of the everyday garter snake from the reptile genus Thamnophis, and its ‘O’ shape recalls a pictographic symbol, or glyph. In Mayan culture, the glyph was a sculptured symbol, and, indeed, the snake’s photorealism optically pops as three-dimensional. The snake is brought back down to dusty earth, metaphorically, from the evil whisperer of sinful acts to the instinctual Eve back to the beauty of common nature. But perhaps eating from the Tree of Knowledge is not such a bad thing for women that has been faulted! Shakespeare is recalled in Ileana’s Dumitriu’s Titania, the queen of fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Usually the fairy sorceress turns her victims into animals, but in the play there is an inversion of sorts as she falls in love with the laborer, Bottom, transformed into a half donkey by the mischievous Puck. For Dumitriu, though, Titania remains the queen of the forest in which she resides, signaled by the leafy branch covering her. A proud woman of color emerges from the blackened silhouette on the wood. But is it a forest over which the enchanted female resides because her image is surrounded with an ambiguous aerial shot of a vast cityscape. Titania is now an urban sorceress where nature is sparse, yet clings to her. In her installation of sculpted and painted grasses, branches, earth, and animals, Molly Gambardella, in Second Growth, suggests both the fragility of the environment that Mother Nature so knowingly birthed, its senseless destruction by the forces of culture in the current global warming crisis, and how she, the artist, can cast her own spell in reconciling the separated pieces to form one overall unit, a second growth, a rebirth, even resurrection, of literal natural forms. The monkey reminds us of the Latin phrase Ars Simia Natura—Art is the Ape of Nature. So art, even throughout the early modern times of the Renaissance, considered the domain of men, is updated by Gambardella as a reminder that the derivation of art is the feminine force of Nature. Another touch point of the installation references the bits and pieces of body and animal parts thrown into the brew of the Three Witches in Macbeth conjuring up terrible predictions of the future,—here the end of game of natural forces until a form of magic intercedes to revive them.
The little girl in Hank Paper’s The Tharanithrope, so reminiscent of the small girl glowing in gold colors in Rembrandt’s Night Watch, blocks the body of a peacock, and therefore metamorphoses into it, as its arresting spray of iridescent feathers, dotted with eye shapes, is visually flattened so that she becomes one the peacock, symbol of the sun, moon and stars of the cosmos from ancient Babylonian and Persian times through medieval Christianity. Theriantropy is the mythic ability to transform into an animal. The magical ability to shape shift of the little girl into a cosmological symbol of immortality permeates the image as a juvenile possesses a magical means to become actual nature, and as a symbol of the interconnection of earth, animals, humanity, and the universe.
In three videos, we encounter the degrees to which nature and culture intersect and the power of pure nature to pull us into the unknown. Lindsey Caputo’s Waning Crescent Moon in Sagittarius drags us through a nightscape, while the shadow of a car propels forward through the darkness of suburbia and low fields, with reflections of globular light and square windows reflected against the inside of the car window. The video ends as we enter a more unpopulated and dark place punctuated by tall telephone poles and there is a uneasy feeling out in this space that exudes a Blair Witch sense of isolation and threat. Erin McKenna’s Box lowers the gaze to a worm’s eye view at the base of plant roots. Glowing yellow insects crawl through this small jungle, but space is altered and they appear to squiggle along on a flat glass interposed over the green foliage. Within this cropped, boxed view, a microcosm of nature’s elements thrive, unaltered by the macrocosm flourishing above, yet manipulated by the artist’s abilities to alter spatial relations and natural forces as the image fades to just the glowing, irradiated insects. It is a scene reminiscent of the opening shot of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet when the director thrusts the camera to the grass roots on a suburban lawn to the ants crawling beneath. In both, the viewers are equated with the busy insects, inconsequential yet necessary in life’s chain. A black male figure strips off his printed Western t-shirt to don a cloth around his waist as he stands within the green stalks of a meadow with a copse of trees looming in the background in Kokou Ekuagou’s video, Resurrection. The magic man performs a ceremony where a milky substance is poured onto the land from a small wooden bowl, symbolically nourishing it. Receding back into the forest, he re-emerges dressed in another set of clothes in an African print with long tunic top and pants. He raises his arm in a cruciform shape, hailing his return to his customs and as one with nature as musical voices form the soundtrack. Our viewpoint is crouched behind the swaying delicate grasses, and we almost espy him in secret as he walks back and fades into the trees.
The Sunbather of Annette Woman’s painting reinforces the Woman as Nature trope with a pregnant woman floating on water’s surface. The theme of motherhood moves us back to Shaughnessy’s more confrontational and ambiguous image of motherhood with a cropped milky nipple, whereas here the rounded forms of the female pregnant body float in water, much as the fetus floating in amniotic fluid, the bumps of her belly, breast, and thighs bulging from the water that sustains her weight under the moon, the traditional feminine symbol of Luna, rather than the masculine solar cult of Sol, or the Sun. In a recognized pose of availability, with one arm crooked over the head, fantastical globes of moonshine connect her with the evolving motion of the universe, and the use the colors of blue and pink serve as an early anticipation of the gender reveal so popular today. In the flat circle of life, so hiply philosophized by Matthew McConaughy as disillusioned detective Rusty Cohle in the first season of True Detective, we are ‘doomed’ to repeat life. So from Womack’s beginning with a pregnant woman to Sara Zunda’s Enrapture, an ending where a skeleton is decked out with a wig, an over the shoulder braid, and chandelier red feather and gold loop earrings, within a Henri Rousseau-like forest surrounds it(her)self. A skeletal bird (vulture?) and a white yellow sky that help to outline its (her) boniness, looking out at us and gesticulates. While skeletons could be used as a witch’s symbol of spells and death, this one engages us with a carry over into life’s adornments. In its (her) remaining skeleton, though, it seems the Rapture of evangelical belief has passed her by.
— Joy Pepe, curator