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Outside
In
Andrea Lilienthal’s wilderness is both a personal sanctuary and a laboratory. She takes trees and branches from Northeastern forests to her Brooklyn studio where she cuts, paints and positions them. She electrifies the bark’s quiet patterns with alarming, sometimes clashing colors. Does this intrusion on the purity of the forest make her a mischief-maker, like Duchamp painting the mustache on the Mona Lisa, or a worshipper decorating an icon? Has she trespassed on sacred ground or honored it by continuing a private process? Certainly Lilienthal jiggles the system. When the work is brought into the art gallery the forest’s displacement induces an uneasy feeling of alienation. The sky is gone. Outside In is a magical realist ecosystem, a world at once human-touched, untamed, bucolic and toxic. There is a dynamic correspondence between the discreet pieces in the installation as they vivify one another. We watch the forty trees of Standing Light dissolve into a Color Field space of flickering hues and look down at Grove, an imaginary garden of poly-chromed surfaces, and then over at Circle Slice whose shifting scale approaches a Pop version of a sectioned orange. Meanwhile Swarm, the delicately wired profusion of pussy willow buds conjuring a swarm of wasps, and the vitrine encased Roots, add slower tempos, which deepen the installation’s atmosphere. Who owns this forest? There is quiet in this series of frozen moments. After all, these objects signify growth suspended. Life is caught in the middle of a breath.
Rick
Klauber, guest curator
Andrea Lilienthal: Paradox and Synthesis Marissa R. Schlesinger Theodore
Roethke, “The Longing” Using
the unique patterns and forms of organic media and adroit juxtapositions,
Andrea Lilienthal’s work highlights the contemporary viewer’s
conflicted relationship with nature. Lilienthal views her works
as having an affinity with Ellsworth Kelly’s efforts “to
force from [his forms] a convincing dialogue between the demands
of nature and those of art” (Waldman 16). Her influences include
the aerial grace of Alexander Calder, the earthbound sculptures
of Richard Long, the rich, textural arrangements of Eva Hesse, and
Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemera, but these are merely points of
departure. While Goldsworthy commonly explores the progression of
natural forms in their native environment, Lilienthal’s work
relocates those forms indoors, and demonstrates that even such radical
human intervention cannot stop time-wrought degradation. Her intention
is not to merely evoke nature, as Calder’s mobiles do, but
to use actual forms of nature and to take her cue from those forms. While
a number of minimalist influences (Jackie Winsor, Carl Andre) can
be seen in much of the work, it is Lilienthal’s kinship with
the work of Eva Hesse that is most obvious in these grounded installations.
These “arrangements of like materials, with each part varying,
focuses attention on the particularities of each element; the height,
the shape, the contrast of the inside and the outside.” (Lilienthal,
personal communication) The gestural oak branches of Reunion, rescued
from storm-damaged trees in Croton-on-Hudson, invite the viewer
to participate in their silent communication. The birch saplings
of Standing Light are, in the artist’s words, “suggestive
of interruption of growth, the stopping of time.” While polychrome
brilliance is typically associated with springtime renewal and summer’s
fecundity, riotous colors fading to brown evoke autumnal melancholy,
and colorless gloom calls to mind winter’s nightmarish dormancy,
this exhibition challenges the viewer by inverting these links.
Outside In asks us to question our assumptions about environment
by turning them inside out. Surveying
a history of nature in art, one can follow a trajectory from the
caricatures of Paleolithic cave art through the illusionism of Baroque
still-life to Impressionist reinterpretations of landscape. Such
a review will highlight a grand paradox: concurrent with artists’
exploration of nature as subject matter is their exploitation of
nature as medium. Naturally-derived media were transformed into
uncanny reflections of our world. Cold stones were carved into life-like
men fixed on their pedestals. Minerals were pulverized only to be
reconstituted as flesh and blood on canvas (itself the result of
the decomposition and manipulation of flax fibers). Trees were chopped,
their limbs amputated and their fluids dried, their surfaces obscured
under gesso and shellac, only to be repurposed as the foundations
of nature’s simulacra. The
modern age brought the blessed curse of mechanization and synthetics.
Inevitably, a distancing from nature followed. Iron and steel replaced
timber and stone, and naturally occurring mineral pigments were
abandoned for colors “of pure joy and pleasure… the cobalt,
chromium, and cadmium hues of nineteenth-century chemistry” In
Standing Light color and pattern call attention to "nature's
unpredictable but inescapable order" (Waldman 15). This neat
row of young trees suggests that the viewer has encountered it along
a trail, and invites exploration. The bold patterns of stripes and
chevrons on these kinked, tentatively balanced verticals bring to
mind those reassuring trail blazes that a hiker relies upon while
following an unfamiliar route. “Walking along paths through
dense forests as a child, I was relieved and overjoyed when I happened
on a brilliant colored marker confirming that I was not lost”
(Lilienthal, personal communication). A line of trees staged in
the artificial context of a white-walled gallery captures the incongruity
of a marked path encountered in natural wilderness. Reminiscent
of a campfire circle, Circle Slice invites the viewer to
kneel down and join in. While the geometry is most obvious from
the high-angle perspective of a standing viewer, it is the intimacy
of the low angle that affords the greatest sense of the piece’s
complexity. A once exalted birch tree lies low to the ground like
pieces of a toppled column shaft bearing mute testimony to a dead
religion. A thin coat of white paint on the interior faces mimics
the color of the exterior bark and the mechanical saw marks on those
surfaces stand in stark contrast to the natural, rough, exterior.
Though the bark is oriented out towards the viewer, the vertical
planes of Circle Slice constitute the greatest surface area
and draw the eye. The precisely painted bands that highlight the
boundary between the heartwood and bark heighten this attraction.
Just as the warm glow of a campfire turns sinister when the ghost
tales begin, so too the openness of Circle Slice turns repellent
when one recalls that heartwood is dead wood, bark is armor, and
the transitional layers—now desiccated and gone—were the
living tree. With each passing day the chasms encircling the cores
widen and we witness the sloughing off of now superfluous protection. The
painted stripes of Circle Slice emphasize the changes that
occur over time but, more often, painting initially obliterates
such markers. The growth rings of Grove are unified under
a solid layer of pigment that momentarily lends a lighthearted air
to these stumps. They remind one of unsharpened colored pencils,
full of potential. They could be comforting markers along the path,
able to guide the viewer in and out of the surrounding wilderness.
However, with the passage of time the rings and cracks of the tree
reassert themselves. These are markers of growth and decay and they
overcome the surface decoration that calls attention to life’s
cycle. In
a similar vein to Grove, Forest Floor subverts expectations
with its painted surfaces deliberately evoking the Amanita muscaria.
This white-spotted, red-capped mushroom is ubiquitous in popular
culture where its fame derives as much from its cartoonish appearance
as its poisonous and hallucinogenic qualities. In nature, where
bright colors broadcast warnings, the fly agaric mushroom is the
quintessential hazard sign, all the more effective because it is
most often found near the muted palette of birch trees. In the urban
landscape bright colors play the same role. One is taught to cautiously
approach yellow police tape, orange safety cones and red lights,
in spite of our seemingly instinctive juvenile attraction to bold
colors. This paradoxical magnetism/repulsion that brilliant hues
incite lends to the unsettling affect of Lilienthal’s work.
While “the sun-faded whites, the [beige] colors of fading away
and withering” (Manczak 133) are most common in eco-installations,
this neutral natural color scheme is as out of place in a vibrant,
man-made, urban environment as a red mushroom is in the earth toned
world of the forest. It requires a remapping of our chromatic signifiers
to safely navigate this new terrain. Swarm
is sprung from the artist’s memory of her mother, attacked
by wasps after inadvertently disturbing their hive. Equally charged
in connotation and contradictory in denotation as Forest Floor,
it draws the eye and mesmerizes. Parallels can be drawn between
the foreboding of Lilienthal’s Swarm and Louise Bourgeois’
Maman,(5) which is a metaphor for her own mother. In each
instance the horrific is bound to the beautiful and the end result
is an uncomfortable melding of fear and love. Similar, too, is the
essential knowledge that autobiographical statements, whether made
by Bourgeois or Lilienthal, “cannot, must not, stand in for
a critical engagement with her work. They are just additional narratives,
which change as they travel through time” This
sculpture is in some way a salve on an old wound. The softness of
the pussy willow stands in direct opposition to the wasp stings
it calls to mind. The strands float and vibrate with a balletic
grace so far from the furious cyclone of disturbed wasps. Each salix
bud is tenderly bound to the next. Lilienthal, inspired by Calder’s
“internal rhythm of lines and shapes in his mobiles and their
actual movement in air” (Lilienthal, personal communication),
replaces the terrifying recollection with a benign specter loop
by loop. During
the artist’s preparatory stages for this current body of work,
in her heartfelt desire to refigure nature in her urban studio,
Lilienthal brought an intact, three-foot diameter tree trunk indoors.
More than the great possibilities the tree offered her, more than
the labor required to move such an awesome thing, what Lilienthal
recalls most vividly of this endeavor is the unexpected “gift”
of nature the great oak brought with it: an insect infestation.
Her enthusiasm soured as she struggled to contain the pests and
evict them, and the tree, with greater effort than it took to welcome
them in the first place. The event was traumatic, and an affirmation
that nothing is as it seems, that death harbors life, and that it
requires fortitude (physical and psychological) to bring the outside
in.
Exhibition Checklist Reunion,
2006. image Standing
Light, 2008.
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