Last November, Michael Endo and Emily Nachison curated the group show “Magic Nature” at False Front Studio, which sought to reinvest the natural world with a sense of mystery the duo claims has been eroded by science. For their collaborative show, “Of Other Spaces,” on view this month at Bullseye, Endo and Nachison continue this exploration of the mythic through painting, installation and sculpture of their own.
Michel Foucault outlined a theory of history which places the emphasis of human experience not on the passage of time but on our physical place and the spaces around us. In Foucault’s 1967 lecture “Of Other Spaces,” he talked about how the world hovers and bounces between spaces either “sacred or profane,” and “protected or exposed.” There are “urban places and rural places” and cosmologically speaking, “celestial” versus “terrestrial.” What does this mean for two mixed media artists collaborating in the same space? Bullseye Gallery in Portland, Oregon has the answer in the form of a duo exhibition presenting the work of up-and-coming collaborating duo Michael Endo and Emily Nachison. Their exhibition, which opens this evening, is named for Foucault’s posthumously published lecture of the same name. The pair’s work “explores mythmaking through the accumulation of meaning and history,” according toEndo’s website. The artists will be available to discuss the influence of this philosophy among other things at the Bullseye Gallery Artists Talk Sunday, April 15th at 2 pm (entry is free, but reservations are required for attendance).
Endo and Nachison work in a variety of mediums from oil on linen, wool felt and yarn, cast glass and the kiln formed glass for which Bullseye Gallery is known. Both artists are based in Portland, and were awarded the Regional Arts and Culture Council Grant from the city just last year. In addition, they each earned their Master’s Degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, Endo in painting and Nachison in fibers. However, the similarities end with their imagery. Much of Nachison’s work plays with dreamy and quirky worlds, reminiscent of spending summer hours in your best friend’s backyard playing “Little House on the Prairie.” Every bit as realistic as real life, and sometimes more so, the boring parts are omitted on a whim, and small embellishments added to suit the scene. Toadstools created out of drippy, bright red glass as in Deliquesce can be seen alongside larger than life glass sculpture, Fairytale Trees. The twin trees sprout spindly November branches sparsely adorned with glowing white orbs teetering in the fragile tops. The effect is sad and precious, like a child’s missing tooth or a single lost mitten.
In contrast, Endo often creates landscapes and still life in conventional mediums based on unconventional subject matter. His gallery on the Cranbrook Academy of Art website depicts two haunting scenes, the first of which comes across like a portrait – it shows an abandoned mattress in a swamp. The second are hunters celebrating their kill in a dusky forest – the kill of a man. For Of Other Spaces,he works with kiln formed glass in minimal and spooky tones, as in the black and white Telegraph and Olympic. The Bullseye Gallery News categorizes this work as a, “reference [to] spaces that are on the outskirts or in the margins of our built world.”
How these artists will marry their seemingly disparate aesthetic worlds remains to be seen by Portlanders with gallery access. It seems the Foucault theory of Heterotopia – places within society that simultaneously mirror and invert the known ethos — is a natural and thoughtful through line for their work. This videoon the Bullseye Gallery website gives insight into the real life imagery that provided much of the inspiration for the exhibition. Fairy tales blend with the all too real world, black ink is etched into smooth glass, and the viewer is left to wonder, is this dark? is this hopeful? and where am I? Foucault answers, “From the standpoint of the mirror…I see myself where I am not.”
Video postcard for Of Other Spaces, February 29 - April 28, 2012 at Bullseye Gallery
(Source: http)
Given that these weekly discussions address the subject of hybridity, it seemed worthwhile to expand the conversation beyond the bounds of art practice per se and foray into those scientific, philosophical landscapes which so often inform the art one makes. In this particular case I had the opportunity to interview, via email, Timothy Morton. Many of my questions about hybridity came into focus after reading his book, The Ecological Thought, (Harvard UP, 2010). You can imagine, then, how awesome it is to communicate with him directly, and especially on the heels of Tessa Siddle’s performative embodiment of plants and animals. In addition to The Ecological Thought, Morton teaches at UC Davis, and has published a number of articles, essays and lectures (a number of which can be read/listened to here). His first book, Ecology without Nature was published in 2009 (Harvard UP). Morton deals specifically with the interrelatedness of life forms— a framework that incorporates and integrates the society of all creatures.
(Excerpt)
Caroline Picard: Can you talk a little bit about the ways we have personified Nature in the past? And how your work disassembles that vision, in order to integrate our consciousness into it? (I don’t know if that’s how you would suggest using your idea of the mesh, but I had a feeling in order to embody that idea, something fundamental would have to shift with regard to my understanding of self, i.e. that I was somehow able to expand that idea of self, or imagine it porous and (also) fluctuating.)
Timothy Morton: It is not so hard to imagine yourself as porous and fluctuating. Perhaps in the old days mystics only could do this, but now all you have to do is have a blood test or read a biology textbook. They will tell you that your body is full of mercury, radioactive materials, and so on. The book will show you mitochrondria, which are bacterial symbionts with their own DNA living in each of your cells, without which we would keel over unable to live at all. Mitochondria are in hiding from the environmental catastrophe they caused, the one we call oxygen.
Nature is not a concept we can take with us into an ecological age. It’s a relic of an agricultural life that has been dominant on Earth for three thousand years but which shouldn’t persist forever — remember that it’s responsible for an awful lot of global warming. We’ve just gotten used to seeing the world that way: as bounded, with a horizon — the sun comes up, the sun goes down, hopefully there are no windfarms on the hill to spoil the picturesque view. Nature just is a picture postcard, not actual coral or bacteria or aspen trees.
Nature is a product behind a glass screen in a shop window. The glass screen is the windshield of your SUV. You drive your SUV through the wilderness to get a couch potato experience of watching Nature as if on TV. Or you watch TV shows of other people doing it, so you don’t have to. Nature is a combination of agricultural framing of the world with its rolling hills and horizons and sheep; and of industry, with its processes and automation. Nature is a modern product that is antiqued to look ancient and premodern. But modernity is over — the writing is on the wall, or rather in the thin layer of carbon deposited from 1790 throughout Earth’s crust, beginning what is now called the Anthropocene. We created a geological era that now intersects with human history: think for a moment about how scary that is. Now we know it — so Nature, which just is “stuff over yonder” — is no more, because we now know that “over yonder” doesn’t exist: it has a real name, such as Pacific Ocean or wastewater treatment plant or neonatal tissue. There is no “away” to which to chuck things anymore.
The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. - Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces
(Source: http)
TJ Norris reviews “MAGIC>NATURE” - Willamette Week
A duo exhibition of sculpture, installation and painting that explores mythmaking through the accumulation of meaning and history.
Bullseye Gallery
300 NW 13th Avenue
Portland, OR 97209 USA
