Matt Distel’s smartly curated exhibition, Now Here: Theoretical Landscapes, currently on view at The Carnegie in Covington, Ky., is a broad sampling of more than 20 regional artists who mine personal and universal landscapes to present hypothetical meditations on locations of space and time.
Spread out between two floors of galleries, Distel’s thoughtful layout of nearly 80 multimedia works (grouped by content and aesthetics rather than by artist) reveals the connections and disparities between a wide range of artists who tackle the representation of real and conceptual worlds.
For instance, artist Tim McMichael’s hybridized image of a sky over Cincinnati and the side of a glacier, “Terminus,” in the main floor gallery, typifies the titular theoretical yet pragmatic approach many of the participating artists have in regard to landscape.
McMichael paints via a meticulous process of taping off sections of his surface, laying down layers of glue, and sifting coal dust and volcanic ash over the paper. The shading comes from multiple layers of the material accumulating on the surface.
Distel’s careful arrangement highlights the similarities between various artists’ imagery. For example, several of painter Michael Stillion’s pieces in the main floor gallery (“Sculpture Glove and Boot” and “Zep Up”) feature spotlights as a way to direct the viewer’s attention within the composition.
Likewise, a new photographic series called “Tending My Grandmother’s Garden” by Emily Hanako Momohara, a Cincinnati ex-pat currently living in China, employs spotlights to illustrate the staged yet organic scenes she photographs.
Momohara regularly uses light as a tool in her work — in “Angel Island” for instance, which is also featured in Now Here, and is in close proximity to Stillion’s aforementioned works — but in this newer series Momohara has hidden her diminutive natural scenes behind the bamboo scaffolding and green mesh curtains that are so ubiquitous in China’s ever-developing metropolises.
Without the light, we might not see the growing world behind Momohara’s green screens; and without Distel’s juxtaposition of Momohara’s and Stillion’s work, one might not notice how both use light to tell their stories.
The connection between Stillion’s paintings and sculptor Christy Wittmer’s work (although very different in media) is also worth noting.
Wittmer creates ceramic and assembled multimedia sculptures that, like Stillion’s paintings, play with the tension of a precarious balance. Although quite abstract in terms of their relation to the idea of a landscape, Wittmer’s works evoke horizon lines and accompanying peaks and valleys of organic forms.
What is perhaps so interesting to think about in regard to Wittmer’s relation to landscape art is how her pieces, with gold-luster underbellies and concrete chunks held up by butter-soft looking porcelain brackets, reward investigation. This quality of seeking-ness seems just as important to the story of landscape for the participating artists in Now Here as finding any land to gaze upon.
C. Jacqueline Wood’s seven-minute video installation, “Moving Pictures (Searching for Horizon Lines),” shares this seeking quality. Wood’s piece is about connecting to an ancestry to which she has no daily link. As a Cincinnati-raised, self-proclaimed “river person,” she uses the tools of a filmmaker — light, narrative, moving pictures and sound — to seek a connection with her sea-faring ancestors.
Wood appropriates disparate points of reference to guide her way: an amplified audio collage of her grandfather reciting the poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the earliest known recording of a human voice from the 1860s and the sound of waves crashing onto shore taken from a YouTube video. The film features drawings and other “gems” she collected and pinned to the walls of her Essex studio, and there are hidden visual cues that point to the ways in which Wood is seeking and finding her own horizon line via her medium.
Many more artists in the upstairs galleries are worth mentioning: Bill Ross, Joey Versoza, Caleb Marhoover and Joe Girandola each offer an intriguing perspective on the theme.
The regional artists within Now Here seek to broaden the possibilities associated with the term “landscape.” And when artists actively seek new ground, they may never run out of new territory to explore.
NOW HERE: THEORETICAL LANDSCAPES runs through April 18 at The Carnegie. More info: thecarnegie.com.
This article appears in Mar 25-31, 2015.