Narwhal Art Projects is pleased to present Atlas Findings, a group exhibition negotiating new possibilities in modern landscapes. Leon Benn, Jacob Whibley, Megan Whitmarsh, Paul Wackers, Tessar Lo and Peter Mettler offer peripheral views from distant lines, sharing explorations of modern landscapes through painting, collage, embroidery and film. Their constructed environments form six unique visions of the world surrounding us, communicating unique perspectives ranging from joyful optimism, futuristic imaginations, deep introspection, insightful observations and terrifying realities.
Today’s landscape serves as a distortion of nature and technology beyond original recognition. As humans we possess the innate need to romanticize nature, to somehow preserve it, save it, call it our own. In the past, the natural world was faithfully recorded, revered and reconstructed with the goal of communicating the sublime. Through the last century this form of landscape depiction has fluctuated in popularity. Paralleling the cultural climate surrounding us, reverence gave way to exploration and discovery, which led to criticism and activism, which in turn led us back to appreciation and new acceptance. We simultaneously embrace the natural world, question our place within it, desperately try to savor it and accept the inevitable destruction brought on by the same hands that so eloquently captured her beauty. The perspectives we take on the environments around us are diverse. We select what we want to focus on, what we want to ignore and what we want to immortalize. With rapid environmental evolutions pushing us forward, pausing to focus, decipher and record constructed landscapes has reached a new level of importance. No longer contained to straightforward interpretations, contemporary landscape artists construct environments both real and imagined allowing our consciousness to rest somewhere between what we know, remember and what may become.
Leon Benn
I do not consider my work didactic, but rather, I strive towards a re-thinking of the idea of the romantic and sublime within painting. After my time at the Rhode Island School of Design, a year of which was spent painting and studying art history in Rome, I worked in a commercial mural painting studio in New York City. The majority of the projects in the studio were comprised of painting in a style of highly embellished realism, at times reminiscent of Nicolas Poussin, Fragonard, Bouguereau and the Hudson River school painters, like Frederick Church. Despite the often oppressive commitment to repetitive, monotonous depiction of symbols and forms that were fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries, many classical painting techniques were, over time, imported into my studio practice. Almost an act of rebellion against the long past Fragonard regime, and the nouveau-riche client base that re-embraced these motifs, I chose to paint dark, sloppy, obscure natural forms, at odds with the sugar coated products of the mural studio, yet still attempting to engage with the history of technique and illusion in painting. I aim to alter the landscape tradition into a bizarre junk pile, at times monumental and romantic and at others banal and abject. Layer after layer of glazes, a swimming hole, a portrait, a firestorm take shape, echoing a post modern flux of ideas and images. Within these images ambiguous organic forms, at times closely resembling slime mold and fungi, elements that bring to mind decomposition and decay merge with waterfront condos, sand or mango colored furniture that sits below a computer generated silhouette of trees and birds.
The sublime, according to Immanuel Kant, is in the mind, not the object. It is a walk in the wilderness at night, the loss of vision, the finding of an unexpected place that is both frightening and cathartic. My paintings attempt to recover this place. They emerge from the paradox of our contemporary relationship to nature. Instability and rupture mark the relationship between nature and society. The more connected one is to nature, the more terrible is its intensity. The more removed, the less we feel. I take inspiration from the filmmaker Werner Herzog’s commitment to exploring this paradox. Most often the point of departure in my work is a landscape. I strive to create a space of organized and violent chaos in which the natural landscape is the subject, the figure – the protagonist.
Tessar Lo
Tessar immigrated to Canada with his family from Indonesia in 1989. Though he is culturally Indonesian and Canadian, his Chinese ethnicity played a major part in his maturing as an artist. Influenced by the mysticism of Asian cultures and coupled with the multiculturalism of Canadian society, Tessar takes a universal approach to his artistic practice. His attitude toward image-making is much the same as his outlook on life, to posses the understanding of how vast the world really is. Tessar often uses mixed media to create whimsical, thought provoking paintings that delve into the universal constants of humanity. A calming look in to the human soul. Tessar strives to make art that can transcend his native cultures into a language we all can understand.
Peter Mettler
“Petropolis” Overview:
Shot primarily from a helicopter, filmmaker Peter Mettler’s “Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands” offers an unparalleled view of the world’s largest industrial, capital and energy project. Canada’s tar sands are an oil reserve the size of England. Extracting the crude oil called bitumen from underneath unspoiled wilderness requires a massive industrialized effort with far-reaching impacts on the land, air, water, and climate. It’s an extraordinary spectacle, whose scope can only be understood from far above. In a hypnotic flight of image and sound, one machine’s perspective upon the choreography of others, suggests a dehumanized world where petroleum’s power is supreme.
Paul Wackers
My work is first a response to the world and then a reaction to what it has to offer. Images surround me as abstract concepts, presented by the curious interaction of forms, feelings, and situations. They offer a glimpse into the way the world is constantly being reloaded with opportunities and options for reinterpretations and impressions. It might start with a beam of light passing through a window in the afternoon and that within that beam there is the potential of a full spectrum to appear. In my paintings I try to create the feeling of getting lost in the thoughts that are easily ignored or put aside. Many of my paintings will come from moments seen in films or articles read in the newspaper or simply from a walk down the street. The images tend to be of non-places where the specifics of them are not important but how the elements within the picture interact as parts of another world that is sometimes jarringly familiar to our own. It might be seconds away from becoming reality or lifetimes in the past as a fleeting memory.
Jacob Whibley
Exploring the theme of interstitial spaces, Jacob Whibley’s collages show geometric and organic forms in a suspended moment of transition. Drawing inspiration from modernist design and unfulfilled histories, Whibley assembles each collage through a process of successive movements and emphasizes the contrast between found and intentionally crafted elements. These tactile moments allude to structural and topographic forms as they shift and reconfigure towards newer possibilities.
Megan Whitmarsh
Megan Whitmarsh was born in 1972. She lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (University of New Orleans) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting (Kansas City Art Institute). She is known primarily for her idiosyncratic and detailed hand embroidery; a medium she has been working in since the mid 90’s. She works in a variety of low-tech media including self published comic books, stop action animation film, soft sculpture, painting and drawing. Her work refers to the visual noise of her youth in the 70’s and 80’s. She has shown internationally including solos in New York, Los Angeles, Reykjavik, Toronto, Brussels, Malmo & Barcelona as well as upcoming solos in San Francisco and Seoul.
Whitmarsh is inspired by a desire to be optimistic about the future of humanity. She combines the everyday parts of modern life with the iconography of the supernatural and fantastic and thus transforms the mundane into something magical feeling. As a child of the 1970s her sense of futurism is informed more by Star Wars than Tomorrow Land and her work references the visual noise of her youth. “Perhaps the healthiest kind of futurism is one that admits entropy and flux. Perfection is suspicious; worn and dusty can mean well-loved, too. I consider art a practice of transformation. We cannot expect to make new energy; instead we must reinvent, recycle, and transform what exists already. Making art is my attempt to synthesize my optimistic vision of the future with my pragmatic appraisal of the world I inhabit.”
Photos from the Atlas Findings Opening Reception, April 1, 2010:
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