No One is an Island Artist Statement

“Earth, that nourish'd thee, shall claim

Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up

Thine individual being, shalt thou go

mix for ever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock,

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain

Turns with his share, and treads upon.”
--Thanatopis, William Cullen Bryant

In Landscape- Scene from “Thanatopsis” (1850), Asher Durand envisions the ameliorative influence of nature discussed in Bryant’s eponymous poem. “Thanatopsis” (1821) is a meditation on the eternal cycles of nature as a moral comfort for man facing the inevitability of death. The poem evokes a larger interconnectedness of humans and nature, amid Western expansion, Manifest Destiny and the industrialization of the United States. While Durand’s invented landscape calls to mind the benign grandeur of nature evoked by the Hudson River School, his idealized landscape omits a darker side of nature: disastrous weather, disease, and destruction that challenged human’s desire to tame what was seen as feral.

My directly-painted-on-wall Thanatopsis Revisited (Island, Sanctuary, The Physical World) (2011) reconsiders Bryant’s poem via Durand’s painting, while also addressing the 1970s Earthworks movement. Rather than take the gallery into the landscape, I’m interested in bringing the landscape into the gallery. The imagery is culled site specifically from Governors Island (from the debris of demolished buildings to the silhouettes and shadows of London Plane trees) and I intend for it to quietly overwhelm and eclipse the majestic views of Lower Manhattan from within the gallery. I was thinking about how Frederick Church exhibited The Heart of the Andes with curtains to create an illusion of a window and how the painting, executed before the moving image, now seems cinematic.

The color palette and its depiction of nature extend the nature/human binary, questioning the synthetic/naturalistic definitions in the source of pigment colors. It may appear drained of color, like crepuscular light or the multiple shadows in outdoor lights at night. The echoing shadows appear three-dimensional or sculptural and the shadows of pipes and sprinklers in the gallery space are painted, obscuring the relationship between the painted image and its environment. I want the boundaries of painting to be erased from within, for the image to grow in a way similar to what it depicts.

The painting hung on the wall, Rozel Point (All Things are Interconnected) (2011), faintly depicts a weather worn piling from a defunct oil derrick decking in the vicinity of Robert Smithson’s “The Spiral Jetty.” Splintered by wind tossed salt and sand, the piling also appears as if a live sapling. I enjoy the enigmatic ambiguity, the suggestion that the machined pole is slowly and entropically returning to nature. Even though Smithson hated painting, I think he would have enjoyed this visual metaphor.

Smithson acknowledged the destructive forces of nature, that humans were not the only entities capable of destroying its environment. While today an ameliorative quality exists in many forms of the natural (organic food movement, herbal supplements and therapies, weather-harnessing energies), its destructive tendencies persist (hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, climate changes). Only in an inclusive examination of the natural and human environment will we come closer to a symbiotic relationship with it.