Landscape/Cityscape

LANDSCAPE / CITYSCAPE

December 9th, 2022 – February 25, 2023 

Abattoir presents a group exhibit of artists who look at landscape, both rural and urban, through a personal lens, to reach an inner landscape, likened to an element of self- portraiture; ‘the weather inside”. Zeroing in on a particular segment of the visible world or by inventing a place based on memory, artists attain a mode indicative of “the weather inside’ as first expressed by artist Lori Ellison (1958- 2015), when she proposed a show “The Weather Inside” about the spiritual and psychological correspondence of landscape to the soul of the artist. While Lori’s show never took place, her concept remained with me. 

Light is the starting point for Lumin Wakoa who often paints en plein air; the light of a specific place, an animated profusion of forms and energies of trees, flower, a path, and the twilight shapes of a cometary. Vibrant brushstrokes indicate both the actual and the shifting way that things appear, projecting a mood, so that each landscape becomes a self-portrait. 

Adrian Eisenhower also approaches plein air painting in terms of light. His postcard sized panels of Cleveland scenes mine a romantic tradition that comes out of early 20th century and before. Spontaneous and fresh cityscapes that find abject industrial beauty in the familiar streets, and enormous Ohio skies. 

A group of delicate watercolors by Hildur Jonsson are based on the other worldly landscape of her native Iceland. She continues her transcendent interpretation of the actual places she has visited and depicts in her woven paintings. Her evocative clouds and skies especially fit the idea of the weather inside. 

Herman Aguirre paintings are of gritty urban memorials to victims of gang violence in his neighborhood, the south side of Chicago. His highly textured compositions have illusionistic collaged elements that often project beyond the rectangle, to detail spots that resonate with loss and beauty. 

Dana Oldfather’s atmospheric landscapes contain the dappled shadow and stillness of a mythical forest on the brink of immanent activity. Shafts of light fall on leafy shapes, spotlighting details and textures that blur and come into focus, the way the eye lands on near and far. Oldfather is a rapidly evolving painter who moves from botanically accurate details to the numinous within a single work. 

Brooklyn based Liv Mette Larsen’s ongoing Bushwick Series are egg tempera on linen. Her reductive views of warehouses and low buildings out her studio window have been described as “buildingscapes”. Geometric forms set against sky evoke a calm simplicity. 

Spencer Young’s photos combine fragments of sky and buildings seen from below into digitally manipulated compositions that distort the vantage point. Framing a section of sky in an arrangement of buildings gives a feeling of the city’s chaos and of human smallness in a canyon of construction.