Land Filler
A review of "Vantage: A Landscape Exhibition" at Good Mother Gallery
First off, I just want to apologize for the long delay between posts. I started a new job a couple months ago and then I was feeling under the weather for a few weeks. It’s been a little bit of an adjustment period. Fortunately, I’m feeling better and I’m trying to get back into this. My goal right now is to write about twice a month. I deeply appreciate that all of you have subscribed and I’m grateful for all of the positive feedback. Every single new subscriber gives me an incentive to keep this going and make it as good as it can be. Thanks to all of you. I also want to give an extra special big thank you to everyone who has become a paid subscriber. As a bonus for subscribers and patrons, I am going to start providing an occasional exclusive. The first of these will be my next piece about the Shara Hughes show at David Kordansky Gallery. If you’d like to read you can sign up for any of the paid tiers now. I bet that some of you can afford it ;)
And Now: back to our regularly scheduled programming...
Discussed in this essay:
Vantage: A Landscape Exhibition
Featured Artists:
Olive Diamond, Anthony Padilla, Kristin Moore, Dylan Hurwitz, Michael Draghi, Tom Colcord, Christopher Tandy, Angel Cotray, Jen Hitchings, Jonathan Ryan, Adam Sorensen, Matt McCormick, Andrew Durgin-Barnes, Sarah Thibault, Patric O’Neill
1212 S. Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, California 90021
September 2 - 22, 2023
Sometimes I wonder: are broadly curated group shows like this even meant to be reviewed? The generic catchall title “Vantage: A Landscape Exhibition” and the nearly redundant press release (hint: it’s about landscapes) suggest not. I suspect, anyway, that shows like this are meant for other purposes: to showcase the gallery stable, test the waters for lesser known talent, sell art, and create networking opportunities. Reviewing it, at any rate, is an impossibility. One ends up, essentially, re-curating the show: ordering chaos, separating wheat from chaff, and identifying latent themes which could, usefully, serve as the concept for another, actually better show. It’s a shame though. Given all of the resources involved it seems kind of wasteful to do it without having an idea. After all, that’s the one thing which is free.
In this case, it is specifically a shame because the landscape is having a moment. Shara Hughes’s incredible show at David Kordansky Gallery opened this week and it seems like the right time to examine the genre. What is it? The nearly incoherent variety of work in “Vantage” suggests that it’s just a collection of disparate tendencies. Of course, so is every genre. The point of curation is to tease out which thread might be the most relevant. In the interest of re-curating this show, I would proffer a few overlapping trends along with some outliers, eccentrics, and edge cases. The following taxonomy is semi-arbitrary and most of the painters could be shoehorned, just as easily, into one of the others. Please regard these casual groupings as proofs of concept for more thoroughly curated shows.
The most widely represented tendency here is what I might call The Edenic Painters: nature in all its unspoiled glory. For instance, no less than three artists in “Vantage” depict salubrious palmed grottoes complete with resplendent waterfalls. This category includes Anthony Padilla, Jen Hitchings, and Adam Sorenson. Oddly enough, these artists’ work is the most directly informed by digital media - as if to compensate for the Romantic escapism of their subjects. Of these, Hitchings’ works are the best. The verticality is reminiscent of Japanese landscape paintings and offers a welcome respite from the cliches of western perspective. Sorenson’s paintings are transporting, but I feel like he needs to let loose and/or break out of 90’s fractal landscape calendar mode.
Kristin Moore and Michael Draghi’s work are sort of ancillary to The Edenic - their subject being Los Angeles itself. That is, what is LA if it isn't an exotic and imaginary place - one famous, no less, for its singular grotto? Moore’s Golden Hour (2022) depicts LA as viewed from somewhere in the hills, say, atop Mulholland Drive. A classic pink and tangerine LA sunset looms over the foreground trees and distant urban sprawl. This is LA as Romantic Apparition: hovering directly in front of us, but centerless and ungraspable. There’s no there there, as they say. Draghi captures that sheen, but without the sense of longing.
The next category is The Academic Flaneurs. These are more like en plein air painting even if they aren’t - literally depicting backyards, street corners, or a walk in the park. This includes Tom Colcord, Matt McCormack, Dylan Hurwitz and a few others. Most of these strike me as bland or academic vanilla. Matt McCormack’s A Break Before the Return (2023) is one of the better ones. It’s too beholden to Edward Hopper and Robert Bechtle, but it does capture that sense of lonely pathos. It’s hard to tell if this painting is about light, geometry, nostalgia, psychological content, or something else, but it is intriguing.
Tom Colcord paints suburban backyards with dense foliage in a way which is not un-Edenic, incidentally. They are technically impressive. Nevertheless, as John Berger asserted in his classic “Ways of Seeing”, landscape painting traditionally represents the idea of property - land as the original source of value. Colcord’s paintings seem to be about nostalgia, more than anything else, but they don’t totally avoid this pecuniary connotation: the suburban garden/home as keystone of the American Dream. This makes me queasy. It speaks to the essentialization of middle class experience: its assumption of universality. The colors are precisely “right” as if they are all too happy reifying this middle-class content.
The last and best category here is what I call The Dystopian Visionaries. These artists include the three best painters in this show - Sarah Thibault, Andrew Durgin-Barnes, and Jonathan Ryan. Collectively, they offer the most effective rationale for the genre’s very existence. These artists, more or less, implicitly evoke the specter of climate change. In doing so, they acknowledge that our current obsession with this genre is, itself, notably a response to that phenomenon: our impending doom. These three artists are stylistically dissimilar, but linked by underlying themes.
By far, my favorite painting in this show is Prehistoric Desert Landscape (2023) by Andrew Durgin-Barnes. It depicts an invented desert landscape, per the title: craggily rock formations, palm trees, and cacti fill the foreground before a simmering volcano. Of all the works in this show, it is both the most realistic and the most skeptical of representation. This is so perverse that I can’t help but wonder why anyone would do this except, of course, why wouldn’t you (I mean, if you could?) It’s like an atheist going to mass, just for the fun of it. It continually gives up its representation - dissolving into painterly effect - while maintaining its verisimilitude.
It reminds me of a quote from Marcus Aurelius’s famous “Meditations” which I saw on Twitter recently, courtesy of Mike Lisk (@apmike):
“In man’s life his time is a mere instant, his existence a flux, his perception fogged, his whole bodily composition rotting, his mind a whirligig, his fortune unpredictable, his fame unclear. To put it shortly: all things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusions, life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.”
After all, dinosaurs - the presumed denizens of Durgin-Burnes prehistoric desert landscape - are all dead. Extinct. It seems to say: the moment you die, everything solid melts away - just like it did for the dinosaurs. Images are illusions. Painting can do stuff like this; make us see the nature of reality and the reality of our own demise: “the impossibility of death in the mind of the living”, as Damien Hirst aptly put it before succumbing to insufferable mediocrity. Talk about fame unclear.
Sarah Thibault is another standout. Her painting Tujunga at Night (2023) depicts a wooded canyon in shades of red. It’s moody, meditative, gorgeous, slightly hamfisted, and dreamy. The warm reds are the right wrong colors for this setting. (Colcord, take note.) They read as both a mood - comforting, like a walk in the park on a warm summer night - and as an allusion to global warming: the insinuation of fire. It’s a nice painterly double-entendre. Her work bumps up against the aforementioned Shara Hughes, but proposes an alternate direction: towards something looser, bleaker, moodier, and more portentous. This might, in the long run, be more apposite.
Finally, the weirdest artist in this show is Jonathan Ryan. His work feels totally incongruous, which speaks to the pointlessness of the curation as much as his fabulous eccentricity. Ryan is mining early video games for content while prefiguring our possible future straight out of Mad Max. The color in Mountain II (2023) reminds me of Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and the orange-brown skies which plagued the Bay Area in 2018 and 2020. Also, not unlike Hitchings’ work, these paintings offer a welcome respite from the tedium of western perspective itself.
The loosely implemented orthographic perspective - depicting a motorcycle race track - is, I gotta say, pretty cool. The surfaces, coated with actual gravel and airbrushed into some kind of NES trompe l'oeil are, also - once again - pretty fucking cool. He’s firing on all cylinders (motorcycle pun intended): the subject matter, composition, orthographic perspective, palette, and material choices are all strange and rife with possibility. Ryan’s reinvention of this relatively marginal source material is a minor stroke of genius. Fifty percent of originality is, after all, rediscovering a discontinued but fertile lineage.
This schtick could, of course, be limiting. He’s right at the edge of novelty “boy” art. It could also be overly beholden to one particular Nintendo game (Excitebike, 1985 - I think?), but there’s a lot here. If he were a band, he might be Battles. He’s marching to the beat of his own chiptune drummer. There are plenty of directions he could branch out: other games, textures, and undiscovered oddities to explore. The world is his freakazoid oyster. At any rate, I fear that this vision might be our future: a global apocalypse straight from The Road (2009), Mad Max 1980), or The Last of Us (2023). Hell on Earth. Everyone dies. The rest of the work here - except for these three Dystopian Visionaries - might just be rank nostalgia.
God, I hope not.
