Fresh Air: Art from the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest at the Ascent Private
Capital Management building was curated by Elizabeth Leach of Elizabeth Leach
Gallery in Portland Oregon, with direction from Martha Slaughter, Bernheim’s Visual
Arts Coordinator. It presents works by current and past artists in residence at the
Bernheim Arboretum, a 14,378-acre nature preserve in Kentucky, in addition to other
regional artists, working with printmaking, photography, sculpture and landscape
painting.
The Bernheim Arboretum’s overriding mission is to “explore [our] deep connections with
nature.” This is not trite lip service to faddish “eco-tourism” or to the type of
environmentalism that considers nature as a separate entity that one looks upon as a
subject. Bernheim, and the Fresh Air show, embodies Shakespeare’s obvious but
overlooked concept that “we are nature too.” This is an easy fact to recognize but a
tremendously difficult one to internalize with one’s entire being. So difficult that (I would
argue) it’s the source, and such internalization is the underlying purpose, of just about
every major spiritual tradition in the world (and I realize the implications of that claim).
It’s one of the many ideas that transcends the limitations of language, and as such
requires something like art to help us sort it all out. And Fresh Air provides that help,
which is all it can provide. The rest is up to the viewer.
In a certain formal sense, Shinji Turner-Yamamoto’s wall hung Constellaria series are
sculptures that are also landscapes. They’re made almost entirely of materials from the
land – fossils, clay, animal glue, tree resin. Rather than representing land through paint,
perspective, or color, Turner-Yamamoto presents the actuality of it, the textural conretia,
the “thinginess” of life. He grows his own crystals using water-soluble minerals on
supports of acetate and plaster, allowing them to emerge from the vertical surface in a
way that embraces randomness but is subtly balanced and graceful. The work achieves a
certain structure without stricture, which, incidentally, could be a definition for elegance.
He allows rain, wind, gravity and light to shape his sculpture and inform compositions,
along with his own reflections on nature, his chosen medium (refreshing the tired dictum
that the medium is the message).
[Insert Constellaria 1]
Shinji Turner-Yamamoto , Constellaria #1, 2014. Ca. 450-million-year-old Ordovician
fossil fragments/powder, cultured crystals, 24kt gold leaf, silver leaf, gesso, clay bole,
animal glue, tree resin, raw linen canvas, wood panel, 28.3 x 19.7 x 3 in. Photo credit:
Shinji Turner-Yamamoto.
His aim, as I see it, is for his sculpture ultimately to bridge that pervasive “lack” in our
lives by providing connections with nature, which really is to say with everything. He
says, “when we are conscious about the existence of these infinite connections [between
mankind and nature], we emerge from our anthropocentric view of life and move into a
holistic view. In doing so, we are free from the limitations of death.” This is admittedly a
rather lofty goal, potentially blasé in a contemporary art world that values irony over
authenticity and, in a nihilistic fit, has displaced art from utopias. But TurnerYamamoto’s project is far from the bombastic utopian visions of early 20th century
modernist “artists/prophets” like Kandinsky and scores of others. Turner-Yamamoto is
more detached, perhaps in the Zen Buddhist sense (a point I hesitate to even bring up
because of its overuse), leaving it to the viewer to figure it all out for him or herself, or
not. Much like, say, a Rinzai Zen master giving a student a koan, perhaps a few
seemingly nonsensical words, a slap in the face, and then going on about his business.
Turner-Yamamoto’s detachment is very different, and infinitely more authentic, than the
haute hipness of the so-called “new casualist” or “provisionalists” “memes” that are
transparently a case of trying too hard not to care, much like an adolescent.
Turner-Yamamoto isn’t alone in his steadfast commitment to the power of natural
materials to make profound statements. Barbara Cooper meticulously glues together
layers of wood veneer to construct forms resembling the material from which the wood
veneer came, such as, in the case of Rhiza and Untitled, a large tree with protruding roots.
It’s apparent her sculptures take time to create and in this realization we ponder the
nature of time, growth and change. Mei-ling Hom creates straw domes inoculated with
oyster mushroom spores. Unfortunately, the piece at Fresh Air wasn’t innoculated, but I
appreciate the potential for an interesting reflection on the combination of aesthetics,
agriculture, and culinary arts, perhaps questioning those dualities.
[Insert Untitled picture]
Barbara Cooper, Untitled, 2002, wood and glue, 72 x 20 x 65". Courtesy of the artist and
Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, Clermont, KY
In Forest Echo I and Forest Echo II, Heike Endemann hollowed out the cross section of a
uniquely furrowed red cedar log and placed compressed, rolled newspaper in the center
(recalling somewhat humorously Ezra Pound’s idea that “art is news that stays news”).
The chainsaw marks from the cut are left rough, the bark allowed to crumble and fall
where it will, leaving traces of tree fiber, the stuff from which newspaper is made. These
gestures of minimal intervention are purposeful and disciplined. The red cedar smells as
cedar does: grandfather’s closet, a well-crafted chest, or, more cerebrally, gin, which is
distilled from red cedar’s close cousin, juniper.
Endemann’s work isn’t just about post-minimalist purity and hand-made formalism. It
functions on numerous levels. First, and for me least interestingly, it is environmental:
placing the paper, made by man from the very stuff that it replaces, at the center of a
hollowed tree questions our intervention into and relationship with nature. That’s a tired
theme traversing the banal and over-trodden surface of sociological, cultural and
environmental issues oversaturating contemporary art. But Endemann aims much higher,
and delves much deeper. She uses a chainsaw to carve the wood, likely an intentional
reference to the folk art of chainsaw carving in her native Germany, where, so the reader
may know, the world cup of chainsaw carving is appropriately held. Like George
Baselitz, she uses the expressionistic surface created by a chainsaw as a metaphor,
perhaps in reference to her country’s brutal history and dark mythologies. She also uses
the chainsaw to question the nebulous intersection of art and craft. I once heard LA based
artist Thomas Houseago quip “try going to Yale to tell them you’re doing wood carving”,
which he has in fact done, also with a chainsaw. Like her contemporaries Martin Puryear,
David Nash, and maybe even Houseago, Endemann is using wood to question these false
dualities between officially sanctioned art –the best barometer of which, as far as I can
tell, is whether it’s made by someone with an MFA – and folk art or craft (Endemann has
a PhD in Biology, but no university art training).
[Insert Forest Echo I]
Heike Endemann, Forest Echo I, 2011, Eastern Red Cedar, Paper, 23" x 23" x 4".
Courtesy of the artist and Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, Clermont, KY
Most interestingly, Endemann’s work raises ontological and epistemological questions.
The title Forest Echo I and II, as well as the formal components of the work, invokes the
familiar question: if a tree falls in a forest with no one around to hear it, does it make a
sound? What about the infinite echo from the fall? Endemann doesn’t try to answer these
questions because her art isn’t about answers, but about positing ideas via aesthetics that
transcend language and expand our perceptions of reality. Of course the solipsistic
response that nothing exists outside one’s own perception is a seemingly close-minded
response fit for an inclusive mind. But however hard one may try, one can’t prove it
untrue using the increasingly blunt edge of western reason and logic. This logic is, in
part, the written word, represented by the paper in the Forest Echo series. This brings us,
as truth tends to do, to an impasse. To a holding of two contradictory ideas that are
simultaneously true. The essence of good art is the ability to synthesize contradictory
ideas into an aesthetic that transcends the linguistic limitations of those ideas, which
Endemann does with an understated eloquence and quiet purpose.
Fresh Air also includes photography, painting and printmaking. Todd Smith climbed
majestically large trees at night in the Bernheim Arboretum wearing a brightly colored
lightsuit while his collaborator, Natalie Biesel, used long exposures to photograph the
movement of his body. The brightly colored ghostlike traces chart the artist in time and
space, playfully going up and down these monster trees, reflections on a deeply rooted
seismic energy; the playful yet powerful elan vital of the forest. Nori Hall takes black and
white photos of idyllic, romantic landscapes, scans them as digital files and adds her own
color. This is an interesting comment on what was there, and then wasn’t, and then was
again, particularly in a world where nature is disappearing at the hands of so called
“civilization.” Nori Hall suggests that there is hope. Nocholas Dowgwillo makes
woodcut prints with no preconceived subject or composition in an almost stream of
conscious continuous line, relinquishing control in favor of something else – chaos, a
deeper order, nature itself? David Sharpe’s watercolors are similarly intuitive, but with a
sophisticated palette of bold colors that somehow don’t seem so bold when placed
together. This, I suppose, could be one definition of harmony, and his paintings are
harmonious.
Laura Von Rosk’s subject in her paintings of trees and vistas isn’t so much the landscape
as memory, nostalgia (in a good way) and melancholy. In short, the Portuguese concept
of suadade. In Bushes at Bernheim, her use of green shows a keen sense of the weight of
that difficult color. It also shows an appreciation for subtlety that comes about only by
those rare people who are actually paying attention to the world around them in a rather
profound way. Without this technical skill and subtlety, these paintings would be
hackneyed and overly sentimental, which they are not.
[Insert Bushes at Bernheim]
Laura Von Rosk, Bushes at Bernheim, 1996, oil on wood, 12.5x10.5. Courtesy of the
artist and Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, Clermont, KY
The theme of nature can also be hackneyed, but Fresh Air is far from it. It’s a sensitive,
subtle expression of the infinite connections between nature and man, distilled and
minimally presented in the sense that removing any component of the show would make
it less of a show. To use an overtly hackneyed expression, with very purposeful
sentimentality, the show is a breath of “fresh air.”