art
If landscape means nature through a human lens, “Landscape at the Limit” should be required viewing for anyone with a Sierra Club calendar at his desk. Instead of those pristine, perfectly framed vistas—the environmental equivalent of rose-colored glasses—this six-artist show asks what landscape looks like when it’s invisible, ignored, taken for granted or unrealized.
 "Nebulous" by Tara Donovan at Second Street Gallery. |
One answer, according to artist Ingrid Calame: It might look like the path a person traces through her surroundings over the course of a day, drawn in colored pencil. (After all, we are animals, and no one can argue we don’t shape our environment.) Another answer, equally attuned to the complexities of the human interaction with nature, from Matthew Picton: Landscape could be the cracks in a parking lot, writ large over a long wall of a gallery in rubber and colored beads. (The pavement is manmade, but from natural resources. And it’s weather that makes it crack.)
Dodi Wexler’s “Worship” answers the question with a list of media that’s almost a poem: “hobby grass, the bark cut out of photographs, string, paper.” Wexler’s collaged images of trees form the shape of a tree trunk (or a totem pole) and are affixed to the hobby-grass background: an agreed-upon symbol for grass that actually resembles grass far less than it does a garment.
As a way of representing landscape, this meticulous construction makes no less sense than an oil painting or an aerial photo; it’s just that we’re less accustomed to it. Tara Donovan’s excellent sculpture “Nebulous” uses the lowly medium of cellophone tape to drive this point home. She’s looped and doubled the tape on itself to form clumps, then piles, then a whole continent spread on the gallery floor, as though we were looking down from a plane on a Caribbean island. It has bays, mountain ranges, peninsulas—at least it seems to, maybe because we are so used to looking at other kinds of symbols (satellite images, topographical maps) and interpreting them as “land.”
The tape’s subtle gradations of color from clear to yellow to white, and the undulations of form, make “Nebulous” oddly alluring. In that sense it’s just like a Sierra Club meadow, but considerably more surprising.