"Out of This World" at PS122 Gallery

Amy Talluto
"Silver Pond/Montana"
2006
Oil on canvas
44 x 32 inches

"Out of This World," currently on view at PS122 Gallery, is a two-person exhibition featuring sculptures and photographs by Diane Carr and paintings by Amy Talluto. Two-person exhibitions are something of a rarity, and "Out of This World" makes me question why. Carr's work complements and, to a degree, responds to Talluto's - and vice versa - making for a rewarding viewing experience.


Diane Carr
"Forest Floor"
2006
Ink, paper, plastic, foam, resin
14 x 24 x 22 inches

Although landscape is a principal subject matter for both Carr and Talluto, their approaches are quite different. Carr's sculptural vignettes depict woodland glades, starry ponds, icy slopes or tree covered hillsides, but these pleasant scenics are fashioned of foam, plastic, resin and painted paper. The brilliant, even startling colors Carr uses are at once poisonous and magical, acidic and jewel-like. Initially, viewers may want to plunge into these cartoon worlds just as they did their childhood day dreams - I know I did - but there is an air of toxicity about the sculptures. Like the beautiful poison dart frog, the work seems to say, "Look, but don't touch."

The opening line of a poem I recently read - "Son," by Brad Leithauser - states that "Memory buries its own." I think of this line as I consider Carr's work. Her body of work is as concerned with memory and longing as it is the juxtaposition of the natural and unnatural, or the literal and metaphorical. How do we treat our buried memories? How do we fashion them to fit our story and suit our purposes, all these millions of cells and thousands of minutes later? Likewise, how will we remember that which we celebrate in this moment? Carr's sculptures are elegies for moments long past, and also for the present, reminders that what is will not be.


Amy Talluto
"Pond"
2006
Oil on canvas
60 x 74 inches

Talluto's accomplished oil paintings can be deemed "traditional landscapes," but her choices suggest she is less interested in painting a pond per se, than she is in unfolding and interpreting that pond. Where one expects space to recede, for example, it might suddenly flatten, or perhaps the contour of a reflection lifts, forcing the foreground to recede as our brain tries to push the imagery back where we feel it "should" rest. In some passages, the effect is vertiginous; if Talluto's paintings are a window onto another world, it's a domain in which our brain and senses will surely be addled. In this sense, she is like the scientist or the precocious infant engineer taking apart the world she observes in order to better understand its makeup. Unlike those seeking answers, however, she is most concerned with the dissection itself. By focusing on the riot of color and form, Talluto strives to reveal the animating force, that invisible weave that ties together all things.


Diane Carr
"Winter Forest"
2006
Ink, paper, foam, resin
24 x 22 x 16 inches

Admiring the work in "Out of This World," it occurs to me that an increasing number of artists are returning to landscape. What's more, the language they use to describe their works is often strikingly similar. The cynical SOB in me would ask, "Well, how many different ways can you frame a landscape?," but, being fascinated by the subject myself, I know that to be a rather lazy, thoughtless dismissal. Landscapes are infused with political meaning; the return of wild scenery to the contemporary gallery is more than a nod to our becoming a more domestic culture, one in need of outside pictures for inside walls.

I've described my recent paintings as "hallucinatory landscapes, sometimes foreboding, sometimes joyous, always ambivalent." In the press release for "Out of This World," Carr writes of her work, "the environments are sometimes peaceful and sometimes ominous in feeling and are a combination of what exists around us." Talluto states that her work is "sometimes bright, lush and flowering...sometimes dissonant, murky and foreboding." Elsewhere, Talluto says, "a shifting psychological mood pervades the group as a whole, moving between realms of magical fantasy, sparkling beauty, anxiety, and the sinister and mysterious." And that's just three of us. I've read umpteen variations on the theme and seen the work of that many more artists who can be considered members of this family.

On the one hand, it's unremarkable. I mean, Nature is ambivalent, after all, so of course it will be "sometimes foreboding" and "sometimes peaceful." Duh. But, with a few notable exceptions, for the last couple of decades landscape has been absent from the Art World (even though wildlife and western artists stuck with it, and bless them for it). More notable still is the prevalence of contemporary landscape art that can be so readily identified as Sublime, landscape that "subverts order, coherence...bypasses the rational mind and concentrates directly on the emotions"(1). For the better part of the twentieth century, Sublime landscape was a goat, or at least an unworthy cliche.

These are turbulent times, however, marked by anxiety and uncertainty. The promise of progress is now viewed with much skepticism and people again recognize the inevitability of cycles, and of growth and decay. Moreover, landscape art has a history of flourishing in countries during periods of intense colonialism. This proved true in China, Japan, and Rome many centuries past, and, within the last five hundred years, in Holland, France, Britain and the United States. Perhaps today, as wars wage on, nuclear weapons again proliferate and global, corporate colonialism is the name of the game, artists are returning to the Sublime landscape, to depictions of an ambivalent world that delights and inspires as surely as it destroys and awes.

"You lose yourself in boundless spaces, your whole being experiences a silent cleansing and clarification, your I vanishes, you are nothing, God is everything." That was written by Carl Gustav Carus in his 1824 "Nine Letters on Landscape Painting." Oh, how the pendulum swings!

(1) Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art, Oxford University Press, 1999

Photo credit: all images courtesy the artists (unfortunately, the reproductions can not do justice to the luminosity of Carr's sculpture)