In something of a conceptual tangent to its recent
Landminds
exhibition, which showcased work to date by the University of New Mexico's excellent and innovative Land Arts of the American West program, the Center for Contemporary Arts (1050 Old Pecos Trail, 982-1338) now antes up for Santa Fe's biggest art week with
Scenic Overlook
. Like
Landminds
, the work is largely about geographies and place, albeit frequently in less obvious ways. Actual roadside scenic overlooks are all about
mitigated views and arbitrary attachments to beauty or significance, so the parallels to the artist's process and the art object are fairly straightforward, but this group distillation of interpretations and riffs that depart from that basic point create a delightfully dissonant collection of place and perspective-based manipulations.
The most ready adaptation is found in Amelia Bauer and Robert de St. Phalle's sculptural effort, "Manifest Destiny." The piece is literally an overlook, a 4 x 8 sheet of terraformed expanse hovering around 18 inches off the ground. The sheet's topography creates a bland, creamy mesa with deep canyons on two sides, while a model tract housing development perches in the center, its streets laid out in the echo of documented crop circles. Bauer and de St. Phalle's work offers a dramatic, bird's eye sense of how our short-term concerns-lawns, swimming pools, two car garages and whether or not cul-de-sacs have enough room for a fire truck to make a u-turn-imprint and pattern the planet with a logic at least as inscrutable as anything we might ascribe to aliens. Further consideration brings up issues of economics and architecture, in particular the disjointed housing hubris that comes with a modicum of luxury. Why is the classic American dream home something that must simultaneously hide from and ignore the elements, while attempting to dominate the land? I've never really thought of home construction as passive aggressive before, but looking down at "Manifest Destiny," it's clear as day.
Nicola Lopez digs at a more organic and equally depressing, if more overtly gloomy, interpretation of the steadily ratcheting entanglement between the built environment and, well, the plain old environment. Lopez makes woodblock and lithography prints on different colors of mylar and then combines a continuously evolving lexicon of forms into explosive, sci-fi, representational entanglements of natural and constructed objects. Here, she assembles a tree comprised of coiled conduit, a trestled tower and a spray of satellite dishes and other cast-offs. It is an ungainly and monstrous thing splayed nearly from floor to ceiling and across most of one broad wall, with droops and piles decaying as fast as they grow.
Despite the sterile order we enforce in our cities and on our shelves, Lopez' tree reveals that it can all be reverse-engineered back into a musky, organic growth that we both fear and emulate. When Lopez uses the precise mechanics of communication appliances and construction internals to draft a lumbering plant, there is something of the same epiphany one finds in overlaying a classic building's adherence to the Golden Mean onto the crazed veins of a leaf; all the control we've exerted is imagined, our laws and will can't change nature, so why is human culture one of such pointless resistance to harmony? It's a simple question, but one that scratches at the heart of our condition.
Providing something of a reprieve in visual rhythm is a wall-borne flotilla of Jordan West's rural-scape paintings. These obsessively crafted portraits of the point at which land meets structure are almost the opposite of the overlook. When an untilled field butts up against an old service station awning or a country road leads past a prefabricated building, it's almost as if one is standing in the place of the "view" and looking back at the humdrum world that adores it. When West turns his attention to something like Niagra Falls, he instills his drawing with surprising and dark-tinged menace, echoing the notion that our relationship with nature is an uneasy tangle of fear and adulation.
Cartography, after a fashion, is the source of Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S Davidson's collaborative animation. The two have chronologically mapped certain battles of three critical global conflicts-World War II, Vietnam and a 20th Century wedge of Arab/Israeli skirmishes-and then depicted the geographies, troop movements and strategies involved in a video projection that renders the violence into something very much like a choreographed dance. Lines are traced in an animation that might be the smoke of artillery or the watery, gurgling wake of history. Another work, a blown-out still captured from a movie, in which something skids to a halt in the dirt, creating a powdery arc ending in a huge billow of dust, points to one of the central conundrums Dubbin and Davidson are intrigued by: An action's very existence can serve to obscure itself. Put that in your geo-political philosophy pipe and smoke it.
Less aggressive works by Jennifer Joseph and David Dunn round off the exhibition with appropriate finesse. Joseph consumes the hulking lobby space at CCA's entrance with an almost invisible tangle of conceptual perspective lines, cocooning one corner of the room with crystalline strands. "Net," made of wire and crystal, is a discreet wedge of synapses firing with a presence that manages to exude both formal rigor and maudlin sentimentality. Dunn challenges everything else in the show by suggesting that before we even consider an overlook, we need to ask if our perceptions aren't intrinsically screwed from the beginning. His sound installation captures the noises we aren't supposed to be able to hear-dog whistles, seed pods and the ultrasonic emissions of trees-and relays them courtesy of custom-built microphones. The trick of it is that Dunn is prodding us to see if we really do hear these things, just without conscious awareness. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that so-called ultrasonic sounds are experienced by human ears through body fluid transduction and bone conduction. All I know is that when we bought one of those sonic pest control units, it didn't prevent any mice, but it drove my wife insane. Dunn's suggestion that echolocation and a host of other contortions of perception might be open to us, if we'd only listen, puts an entirely different, and welcome, spin on just what we might be overlooking.
