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Artificial Nature
Text: Rudy Navarro : Photo: N/A
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Natural Histories, Realism Revisited at SMoCA.
In contemporary art, the terms “nature” and “realism” carry many definitions and elicit different responses among those who study and look at art. So when I heard of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition, Natural Histories, Realism Revisited, I was eager to learn how these two complicated words would be treated.
The exhibition consists of nine artists working in a range of media including painting, printmaking, sculpture and installation. It was immediately apparent that the realism of the show’s title refers to techniques of realistic representation, not some of the avant-garde or more socially engaged artistic movements of the twentieth century. As the exhibition’s organizers claim in the statement accompanying the show, the work is unified by its depiction of the natural world as well as a naturalistic rendering and attention to craft that produce stunning images and objects.
But here I depart with the curator’s position, for while nature is clearly the subject matter of the work, the artists are not advocating a return to or reintegration of nature in our twenty-first century life. Nor does the artists’ hyper-naturalism and painstakingly detailed technique signal a retreat from the technological and mass produced world or an attempt to find refuge in the certainty and authenticity of the artist’s craft.
Instead, these artists conceive nature as the creation of a cultural web of politics, economics, and institutions. To return to or recover nature is not to rediscover its essence, but to make new meanings for it. The fact that several of the artists appropriate or reference other art historical moments or representational styles, illustrated in the texts assembled on the gallery’s reading table, points out the artificiality of nature depicted in their work. In this exhibition, the technique of naturalistic representation is not used to capture and investigate reality or renew claims for the authority and transcendent abilities of the artist; rather, it is a cultural sign that can be manipulated to create meaning.
For example, Walton Ford’s watercolors and prints of birds and their habitats are stylistic copies of John James Audubon’s renowned ornithological illustrations. But Ford adds text to his renderings turning them into political and social allegories. The red macaw in La Historia Me Absolvera symbolizes Cuba with the writing on the print describing an assassination plan targeting Fidel Castro. In Tale of Johnny Nutkin, class struggle is represented with the owl playing the landed gentry and the menacing squirrels assuming the role of workers and peasants.
Similarly, Isabella Kirkland’s gorgeously rendered and meticulously crafted compositions purposely recall Dutch flower paintings and cabinet paintings of the seventeenth century. Like the paintings that Kirkland quotes, she presents us with tumultuous compositions that bulge with flora and fauna, fifty-six species in one painting and sixty-eight in the other. But her historical references not only displayed the beauty and wonder of the natural world but were also wares produced for a newly prosperous Dutch middle-class market and status symbols that used rare and exotic natural specimens to signify the owner’s wealth and stature. Kirkland continues this tradition by naming her paintings Collection and Trade suggesting that the meaning of nature is to be found in its social value as a mark of prestige or its economic value as a commodity.
The museum can also ascribe meaning to nature as illustrated by Sandow Birk’s PRISONATION series. These paintings are bucolic landscapes, referencing the Hudson River school’s style, mounted in the thick, gilded frames that museums use to signify value. But images of prisons in the New York penal system are discreetly painted into these compositions that carry names like Green Haven Correctional Facility, Stormville, NY or Wende Correctional Facility, Alden, NY. Birk’s juxtaposition of the high art value of Hudson River school painting, the museum context, and images of social malaise and disorder suggests how art itself can influence how we perceive nature.
Several artists use the language of naturalism to question its ability to document what is real. Valerie Demianchuk produces lifelike pencil renderings of objects floating on an expanse of white paper. In Terminus, the object in the lower left hand corner of the composition looks completely familiar yet it defies our attempts to name it. Erick Swenson’s anatomically precise model seems half ape, half human. Its realism demands our recognition at the same time that it confuses our attempts to identify the correct species.
I do agree with the exhibition’s curator on one point: naturalistic depiction is a conceptual choice for the artists in Natural Histories and it is this intelligence that makes the show so engaging and pleasurable. For in addition to seeing beautifully crafted and visually stunning artwork, we also get to think about how the conceptual use of naturalistic representation can infuse well-worn traditions, techniques, and subject matter with new purpose and meaning.
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