Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion, unhealthy cost Eli Ridgway’s current exhibition tackles the myriad encounters between human and landscape, tadalafil telling stories of adventure, memory, and failure through a variety of mediums. As always the work is subtle and earthy, qualities which often feature at Eli Ridgway Gallery whose curatorial tastes lean towards the muted and the monochrome.

One human response to the inaccessibility of nature is that of frustration or antagonism such as Matthew Kennedy’s It’s Come Down To This, 2011. Kennedy’s video lives in the bottom of shallow black box, showing a first-person perspective of someone angrily kicking rocks as if a nature experience failed to live up to expectations. A counter response to this antagonism is to embrace the abstraction of nature as in Joshua Churchill’s Rise and Fall (2011), a twenty minute loop of rain and snow forming geometric patterns of light blurring past. Between these two perspectives is Richard Misrach’s Untitled (2009), a solarized print of a meadow and tree line horizon with fog rolling in over the trees. This is not a picturesque image of a nature scene but something that is haunting and perplexing. The solarized image defies what one expects of a scene like this, implicitly questioning the ability to see nature as it is.

Sean McFarland’s series of Dark Pictures presents landscapes through an opaque layer that prevents seeing them from a distance. The dark layer does obscures the details of the images under gallery lights but reveals them under closer inspection. McFarland’s other images function similarly by limiting the ability to “see” nature through the use of experimental photographic development techniques which emphasize the viewer’s cerebral response.

Elisheva Biernoff’s Inheritance (2010), offers a slideshow of intentionally out of focus vacation photos from protected wildernesses, obscured even further by a smoke machine mounted above the projection surface. This technique mirrors the fading of memory that comes from the slideshow both as format and as form of remembering. Closing Remarks (2010), another piece by Biernoff is a series of postcards from various parks around the world. Both of these pieces comment on the idea of wilderness experience as a commodity, questioning the offer of memories, experiences, and objects that can be packaged and taken home.

Is it possible to understand the non-human on its own terms? Ultimately, humans can only have a tentative and distorted understanding of the non-human landscape. This collection of work seems to imply the futility of deep understanding, reflecting the ability to only capture surface details and appearances without ever getting to any deeper or truer meanings or the underlying depths. Our memories of events and adventures blanket the landscape by overlaying natural forms with our experience of them, and it is on this level that humans see and experience landscape.

Better a Live Ass Than a Dead Lion closes on November 5th, 2011.
*all images courtesy of Eli Ridgway Gallery.

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Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion, cost Eli Ridgway’s current exhibition tackles the myriad encounters between human and landscape, telling stories of adventure, memory, and failure through a variety of mediums. As always the work is subtle and earthy, qualities which often feature at Eli Ridgway Gallery whose curatorial tastes lean towards the muted and the monochrome.

One human response to the inaccessibility of nature is that of frustration or antagonism such as Matthew Kennedy’s It’s Come Down To This, 2011. Kennedy’s video lives in the bottom of shallow black box, showing a first-person perspective of someone angrily kicking rocks as if a nature experience failed to live up to expectations. A counter response to this antagonism is to embrace the abstraction of nature as in Joshua Churchill’s Rise and Fall (2011), a twenty minute loop of rain and snow forming geometric patterns of light blurring past. Between these two perspectives is Richard Misrach’s Untitled (2009), a solarized print of a meadow and tree line horizon with fog rolling in over the trees. This is not a picturesque image of a nature scene but something that is haunting and perplexing. The solarized image defies what one expects of a scene like this, implicitly questioning the ability to see nature as it is.

Sean McFarland’s series of Dark Pictures presents landscapes through an opaque layer that prevents seeing them from a distance. The dark layer does obscures the details of the images under gallery lights but reveals them under closer inspection. McFarland’s other images function similarly by limiting the ability to “see” nature through the use of experimental photographic development techniques which emphasize the viewer’s cerebral response.

Elisheva Biernoff’s Inheritance (2010), offers a slideshow of intentionally out of focus vacation photos from protected wildernesses, obscured even further by a smoke machine mounted above the projection surface. This technique mirrors the fading of memory that comes from the slideshow both as format and as form of remembering. Closing Remarks (2010), another piece by Biernoff is a series of postcards from various parks around the world. Both of these pieces comment on the idea of wilderness experience as a commodity, questioning the offer of memories, experiences, and objects that can be packaged and taken home.

Is it possible to understand the non-human on its own terms? Ultimately, humans can only have a tentative and distorted understanding of the non-human landscape. This collection of work seems to imply the futility of deep understanding, reflecting the ability to only capture surface details and appearances without ever getting to any deeper or truer meanings or the underlying depths. Our memories of events and adventures blanket the landscape by overlaying natural forms with our experience of them, and it is on this level that humans see and experience landscape.

Better a Live Ass Than a Dead Lion closes on November 5th, 2011.
*all images courtesy of Eli Ridgway Gallery.

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Rising from the muck, much like the urban wastelands of JG Ballard’s novels, Alex Lukas’ remnant landscapes present viewers with a future vision of our ruined present. These works on paper hover into one’s vision, offering fleeting memories of great cities, lost and then rediscovered. Cities or their fragments are inundated with water, scrub, marsh, and creeping vegetation. Older industrial ruins are covered with graffiti—signs of life without the existence of people or other animals. These scenes of a world, after an unnamed disaster, skirt the line between aestheticizing decay and asking revealing questions of meaning, memory, and mortality that arise when gazing at ruins.

His mixed media landscapes play within the traditions of landscape and maritime painting. Each work is layered, often starting with a screen printed image as the foundation upon which layers of ink, acrylics, gouache, and watercolor are applied. This technique allows portions of his pieces to appear near photorealistic while other parts of the process attract attention to the more painterly areas of the compositions. The layers of different media create complex vistas in which viewers can lose themselves in hazy contemplation.

Central to the exhibition at Guerrero Gallery is a large panoramic painting. The work itself is approximately 50” tall and 396” long (33 feet) and mounted on a curving 270 degree wooden frame that allows viewers to step into the painting, taking in the ruined watery vista from all directions. Unlike the other works, this one utilizes less silk-screening allowing Lukas’ detailed brushwork to shine though. The sheer size of this painting warrants spending time with it to draw out the ephemeral details and immerse oneself in the landscape. This style of painting harkens back to the Eighteenth and Ninteenth Century novelty of panoramas (called Cycloramas in the U.S.) that so enamored and enraged people at the time. They often depicted regional historical events or famous military battles in all their glorious or gory details. Panoramas like these are difficult to preserve and are challenging for collectors but pleasurable for their all-encompassing immersive qualities.

Four or five large landscapes, approximately 25” x 72” each, dominate most of the wall space. Each work, like the panoramic, depicts scenes of flooded concrete and weedy desolation. These areas are familiar sights, reminiscent of the broken and ruined landscapes adjacent to freeways that become popular spots for litter and graffiti. Moody watercolor skies are met with a field populated with ruin and flora created by detailed lines and brushstrokes. Their dreamlike quality quietly places viewers in total view of the aftermath of the unnamed Event.

Additionally, Lukas created a series of smaller pieces, many on torn book pages. These are all done in very dark greens and blues offering high rises covered in vegetation out of Planet of the Apes or again flooded like in Ballard’s The Drowned World. Admittedly, these smaller pieces are less engaging but his large landscapes and panoramic are definitely worth the visit.

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Show ends Oct 8th, 2011
Guerrero Gallery
2700 19th Street San Francisco, CA 94110
info@guerrerogallery.com 415.400.5168
http://guerrerogallery.com/
Hours Tuesday – Saturday 11a-7p Sunday 12p-5p
*all images courtesy of artist and Guerrero Gallery

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