Review of Terra Firma

Terra firma, a phrase once linked with bedrock and other comfortable assumptions, is neither placid nor reassuring in works chosen for Manifest Gallery's recent (November 3 - December 5, 2008) exhibition, Terra Firma. The most serenely beautiful, Jerry Schutte's Buenna Vista Road, 2008 shows us a spare desert landscape, lovely but hospitable only to specialized creatures. Why, indeed, should a gorgeous stretch of desert be hospitable to us? Not necessary at all, which seems to be one of the messages of this show.
Landscapes, though, are where we live. Other works suggest we are not doing at all well in keeping them up. Marc Leone's Carbon and Crust #21, 2004 uses carbon, graphite and paint on canvas to imply a disturbing, distant look at the earth's surface. He sees a bleak expanse. In contrast to Leone's sweeping view, Gerard Lange's Divorce, 2007 presents a single tree, but has no more cheer to offer. In his striking composition a leaf-less tree trunk is broken almost in two, the injured top section bending helplessly downward to thrust across the picture plane. Physically, each of these works is intricately constructed. Carbon and Crust #21 is densely layered and Divorce, described as "photography with mixed media" uses those elements for a distinctly painterly effect.
The hanging of the show presented thoughtful juxtapositions. Hale Allen's Transmittance, 2006, an oil painting in which composition imposes order on a disorderly, in fact scary, representation of electric wires gone awry, was next to Stephen Mishol's Tamp, 2008 (word play on "ramp"?). The latter work, in calm colors and smooth curves, has its own scary elements as the curving roadway becomes conceptual and leads ever upward to some unknown destination.
Nancy Nichols' landscapes reduce land to a black border running straight across the lower fourth of each work, and above that she paints air, a task carried out by Turner as well as anyone but not done badly here. The less threatening one, Pandrosos, 2006, is titled to refer to the dew of early morning while Eriophoros, 2006 calls up cloud and storm.
Manifest makes good use of space not originally intended to show art. Three-dimensional works balanced out the paintings in the more generously sized front room, while the smaller, square-shaped second room showed only two-dimensional works. Melissa Wilkinson's two contributions appeared there, benefiting by being seen together. Her subject in each is flood. In the particular context of this exhibition the idea of water gone wild hits home. It hits home literally in Untitled (Flooded House), 2008, the liquidity of the water perfectly conveyed by ink on mylar. Flood, 2008, oil on panel, is a view from above of a landscape much altered by man, those alterations made useless by encroaching water. In both cases the choice of medium enhances the effect.
Ajean Ryan's Mesa, one of the show's most engaging works, appeared on a plinth in the center of the front room. A construction of layers of fabric about the size of pancakes, topped by what seem to be bits of lichen stuck on pins to resemble trees, was shown beneath a pretty little cotton cloud suspended from the ceiling. The scarcity of trees on most mesas is beside her point, I think. The scene, for all its charm, has an underlying vulnerability.
Two other three-dimensional works, Lost Landscape (Fort Peck), 2008 and Lost Landscape (Sakakawea), 2008 by Stephen Cartwright trace waterways lost to dam-generated lakes. On the wall the jagged paths of the two rivers, in marvelous shades of blue acrylic, at first make one think of lightening streaks. The rivers now are gone as surely as lightening disappears.
Manifest Gallery, a storefront space in a neighborhood not known for galleries, followed its usual custom of posting an internet call to artists for this show. Manifest's rigorous standards, carried out by a ten-person jury, winnowed the 900 works submitted to a smaller pool from which curator Jason Franz made the final cut. The twenty-six works by nineteen artists, as it happens, represent a cross-section of the United States. Because jurying/curating is done on the basis of the work alone this wasn't apparent until content of the exhibition had been determined. The earliest piece is dated 2004, most are the immediate and often dark thoughts of 2008. Welcome to the 21st century!
- Jane Durrell