at the Lois Lambert Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica (through 3 September 2022)
Reviewed by Austin Janisch
The exhibition Reflections On Our Warming Planet, at the Lois Lambert Gallery, signals that the time for reacting to our planetary warnings has now passed. We have transitioned into a new stage, that of reflection. This progression into a period of reflection may at first be difficult to accept. However, such a problematization of our actions through the assembled artworks ultimately proves apt. Conceived by Lucinda Luvaas, the selected participants not only raise awareness of, but also pose a relevant inquiry into the climate crisis of our day. Knowledge of climate change is no longer a novel concept. Awareness of global environmental change not only occupies our consciousness, but has become palpable. As year after year continues to pass with at best proportional reaction, the assembled works act as an archive of what has already been set into motion.
All images courtesy of Lois Lambert Gallery
Encompassing painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and film, Reflections On Our Warming Planet presents the works of twenty-four artists joined with scientists and community activists. It includes the work and contributions of Kim Abeles, Sharon Allicotti, Evelyn Bronwyn Werzowa, Fatemeh Burnes, E. Tyler Burton, Darlene Campbell, Marrilyn Duzy, Ron Finley, Megan Frances, Lawrence Gipe, Richelle Gribble, James Griffith, Alex Hall, Juniper Harrower, Nigella Hillgarth, Jess Irish, Joanne Julian, Sant Khalsa, Margaret Lazzari, J.J. L’Heureux, Lucinda Luvaas, Michael Massenburg, Marina Moevs, Hung Viet Nguyen, Labkhand Olfatmanesh, David Opdyke, Susanne Layla Peterson, Oriana Poindexter, Crystal Reiss, Marianne Sadowski, Spencer Sharp, Gabriella Tollman, Linda Vallejo, Doug Webb, and Robyn Woolston.
Occupying three galleries, the scale of the undertaking is well managed and presented in a cohesive manner. The presented artists demonstrate an exacting command of their respective mediums, creating a space that prompts retrospection. As an exhibition dealing with the natural environment, an attentiveness toward material choice provides a powerful avenue for interpretation.
Hung Viet Nguyen’s piece Sacred Landscape IV #19 presents an imagined landscape that venerates the act of painting. Spiritual rather than religious, multiple vistas are combined to present an amalgamation of environments both experienced and dreamed-up by the artist. Within the idyllic landscape exists a terrain that can be characterized as the sweetly familiar. Nguyen offers up a vista that pays homage to the beauty of the natural. Though fictive, the piece echoes our perception of memory as the past is so often colored a bit brighter than reality.
Presenting three works, James Griffith taps into those connotations associated with his chosen material. Collecting tar from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and employing it on canvas, the viscous substance serves as a link to evolution, extinction and climate change. Natural Selection #1 depicts the process of natural selection as two birds jostle over sustenance that is pulled taunt between the two species. Griffith conveys a tension that alludes to contemporary competition over those resources for which we continually contend for. The piece is further amplified by a circular element that reads as a tree stump with concentric rings. An allusion to the past, these rings trace our planets history. Tar efficaciously functions as a thread though history, an ever-present observer and preserver, as it both predates and will outlast us all.
Marina Moevs’ Interior is a hauntingly prophetic painting that presents the abandonment of humanity from our built environment. Accentuated by the window-sized canvas, the work functions as an aperture into a possible future, or perhaps present, that is in a state of deterioration. A depiction of an empty living room, light shines through the room’s sole window as the natural environment bleeds into the abandon home. Lacking a roof, a tree stands poised to enter into the space and cross the threshold of those constructed barriers now left to rot.
Unmistakable is the connection between Moevs painting and that of Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun (1952). An examination of the mediation between one’s inner reality and that of the outside world, Hopper time after time presents scenes that are in conflict. The manufactured world is seen juxtaposed to that of the natural as if holding the environment at bay. This is precisely what Moevs taps into most plainly in Fire IV. Reminiscent of Hopper’s Seven A.M. (1948), fire and flooding grab hold of the portrayed structures rendering the possibility of destruction a certainty. Fire IV poignantly showcases the reclamation by the environment of once conceded space.
Speaking to the cyclical nature of natural resources, Sant Khalsa’s sculpture Trees and Seedlings I-X draws meaning from both its material and imagery. Photographs of trees burned in the California forest are placed within sheets of glass and positioned between planks of wood. Presenting both refined and charred lumber, Khalsa speaks to the life cycle of the forest. The regenerative role fire plays within the ecosystem recalls, akin to a phoenix, a pattern of life, death and rebirth.
Marianne Sadowski’s In a River of Bottles, is a reflection on the near ubiquitous use of plastics by contemporary society. Within a portrait of the Los Angeles River, a blue heron stands amidst plastic bottles searching for something to eat. Portrayed to mimic fish, the bottles not only speak to the alarming number of plastics found in our waterways, but also convey a dystopian state of nature. Though depicted beautifully, there remains an eeriness to Sadowski’s contribution that problematizes our societal reliance on plastics.
The assembled artists and works demonstrate a keen awareness of concept and process. Individual pieces not only stand as perseverant mediations of environmental collapse, but also prompt personal ruminations on what the future may have in store. It is through reflection that we can both learn and better understand where we can possibly go from here.
Reflections On Our Warming Planet calls to question not only the past, but also by doing so endeavors to interrogate the future. The potency of the utilization of the past through a reflection implies a perspectival shift reorienting the dominant forward looking that so often characterizes response. Calling viewers to pause and reflect upon not only past actions, but also events, the included works unearth resonant responses that go beyond baseborn affirmations of beauty. The twenty-four artists along with several scientists and activists here communicate that the natural world is not only worth celebrating, but also remains an ecosystem in crisis.
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