Gary Brewer

Jackson Pollock once responded to a colleague’s questioning of his work with the retort “I am nature.” Curator Gary Brewer has taken that idea and run with it, in a beautiful, thoughtful exhibition of the same title at Loft at Liz’s in mid-city through April 22nd.

It is not any one person who embodies nature, after all, we are all a part of the natural environment, we are its components, its caretakers (of sorts), its outgrowth. We seek the succor, inspiration, and purpose in the wonder around us, the burgeoning, blossming of the spirit. Art reveals all of this and more, our connectedness in and of nature, our revels in it, our destruction of it.

Thirteen different artists show us this connection, theirs, and ours, in a beautiful exhibition of tactile images in a variety of media.

Aline Mare (above) offers a variety of photographic artworks that in some cases – as with two lightbox photographs – literally glow. But each of her works here, which utilize rich and hypnotizing natural elements such as crystals, roots, and seedpods, create a light-filled world; the universe in miniature made large again; the universe within our bodies. A world of wonder pulses from her images, enveloping, beginning, a process of natural creation and passage.

While the work and medium is completely different, Bonita Helmer’s lush acrylic and spray paint works take us on a journey that seems both inward and to a distant planet. The silvery grey and periwinkle blue backgrounds here are barely enough to contain these travels.

Perhaps one should undertake them on Charles Dickson’s awe-inspiring mixed media work, “Sankofa Spaceship Dogon Class.” Dickson uses found objects to create a starship that goes artistically where few have gone before; highly detailed, translucent in sections, and suspended from the ceiling, it was both a focal point of conversation and attention at the exhibition’s opening, and a literal invocation of transport. His aluminum “Point of Departure,” a silvery wall sculpture that dazzled with light, accentuates the idea.

David Lloyd offers a series of mixed media works on wood and paper, with geographic components that resemble both kaleidoscope and origami flower. If these works indicate growth and change, then they’re a natural step toward the astonishing work of Gary Brewer, below, who would’ve been remiss not to include several of his own lush oil on canvas, and watercolor works on paper, here.

Brewer’s work offers both interior and exterior intricacies, mutable, vividly colored, dream-like. They take on inner and outer space at the same time; we contemplate what could be the molecular building blocks of existence, and life forms sailing through the stars, forming new worlds. There is gravitas and majesty in this work, but also a playful sensibility, an inward joy.

Joy is perhaps not the zeitgeist in the narrative Jesse Standlea presents, in sculptural works that are beautiful but dark, their titles focused on “Mortality,” and an awareness of the natural order of things: all things die, some things come back.

At least that is the case if we do not destroy our own natural world.  Monet Clark’s color photographs, give us images that point to the invasion of the natural world by human beings, and the destruction that cavalier dominance can cause.

Nick Brown’s mixed-media painted works, which include materials such as cotton rope, white sage, and shark teeth, are beautiful, but fused with a kind of inward sadness. And it’s no wonder: the images are representative of the remains of burned homes in the San Bernardino mountains. 

Perhaps we are only a small step away from our own destruction – if we destroy nature, and it is us, then we are all nothing but ash. Or perhaps there are boundaries we could set for change, as in Paul Paiement’s works in acrylic on wood-panels, depicting the dichotomy between natural settings and man-made structures (above). His ceramic and acrylic insect “Hybrids CS” series is something else altogether: is this the mutated result of man and nature in consort?

Richard Mabula’s untitled oil on canvas and board four-panel painting is dark and monochrome, evoking the color of raw wood; on the far right, a smiling/fierce skeletal face seems like a warning of what will happen if we do not respect nature – and our own.

Equally dark yet somehow redemptive are  Shiri Mordechay’s small individual drawings on paper, above, each offering precious clues to a different world.

Xu DaRocha takes us full circle, perhaps, with ceramic moon rocks that appear about to gestate; blissful floral colors in acrylic on canvas works, and a world with choices to be made, as with the sultry snake and equally reptilian blue hand invading the floral bliss of “How far is heaven.”

Perhaps that is the point here: if we are nature (and we are), it is imperfect and wonderful, profoundly holy and routinely ruinous; ready to bloom and consume, to thrill, inspire, destroy, and rise again — whether here on this earth, or in another form of natural eternity.

Work by Aline Mare, above.

There will be an artist talk on April 17th at Loft at Liz’s – go get in touch with your natural self.

– Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis, Gary Brewer