Substance and Increase

About

Near the beginning of his great poem “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman ecstatically invokes a burgeoning world and our connection to it. “Urge and urge and urge,” he wrote, “always the procreant urge of the world…Always substance and increase…always a knit of identity.”  It’s especially worth recalling Whitman—a consummate urban New Yorker, yet one deeply sympathetic to and energized by nature—in our era, when such a “knit of identity” between us and the natural world seems profoundly frayed, and oftentimes nonexistent. In the recent presidential campaign there were three debates, moderated by esteemed journalists. Not one of these journalists asked the two candidates a single question about climate change, which is likely the most pressing issue facing us.  There were questions about energy, about how we can best use natural resources, but no recognition of how we are inextricably part of nature, and also how we are greatly contributing to dire upheaval in the natural world.  This lack of recognition, itself a form of blithe denial, continues the anthropocentric fantasy that we—quite recent additions to a planet more than four billion year old—are somehow above nature, or masters of nature. Increasingly, this fantasy looks perilous. It is therefore a very good idea to turn to artists who understand, with both intellect and feeling, our connection with nature; who comprehend our links to trees and fossils, wind and soil, and to cycles of growth and decay, and whose compelling works are born of a sustained engagement and dialogue with the natural world.

Substance and Increase brings together Gabriela Albergaria, a Portuguese artist living in London, and Shinji Turner-Yamamoto, a Japanese artist living in Ohio.  Both uncommonly utilize (and remake, and transform) natural substances, at times collected in far-flung locales, in hybrid works that are both found and made, natural and mediated—real nature-culture conflations. For Albergaria, trees, leaves, bark and soil are just a few of her primary materials which she employs in sculptures, drawings, and text-based works. Wrapping around two walls, her elongated, quietly stunning drawing in 11 panels represents the space between two Sweet Gum trees planted close to one another in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  Albergaria’s quasi-geometric system seems very expansive, even immense, and also evokes relationships and connections—between species, individuals, and separate locations. Albergaria excels at eclectic works, responding to the anthropocene age, that thoroughly blend nature and the human. Nearby, three monochromatic carpets on the floor are coupled with accompanying colors and texts on the wall. The wool carpets, handmade via a traditional Portuguese technique, were dyed with three natural pigments, ochre, sienna, and umber, derived from earth; domestic objects for interior spaces are thus suffused with the outdoors. Numbers on the carpets refer to color list of Faber-Castell color pencils, while the texts on the wall, looking like an outsize color chart at the hardware store, denote the actual composition of the dyes. Among Turner-Yamamoto’s chosen substances, incorporated into enthralling paintings and mini-sculptures, are fragments of West Virginia coal, 450-million-year-old Ordovician fossils, growing crystals, quartz, wind, rain, and ceramic archaeological shards. With their subtle earth tones and lovely striations, Turner-Yamamoto’s Sidereal Silence paintings, composed outdoors in Ireland, aren’t landscape paintings at all but instead paintings made by and with the land and environment, and they include fossil dust, turf ash, tree resin, mica, rainwater and other materials. His gritty, yet also delicate and sensitive, Constellaria paintings likewise include various substances, some attached directly to the canvas, while his small sculptures, which resemble geologic specimens, fossils, and archaeological fragments but also seem magical and talismanic, are actually hybrid creations, crystals, for instance, that he induced to grow around a piece of West Virginia coal.  Time is also one of Turner-Yamamoto’s chief themes.  His works embrace a vast scale of both geologic time and cultural history.

Both artists incorporate raw natural substances into their work, and both also deal in increase.  Albergaria’s meticulous (even obsessive) drawings arise from an accrual of thousands of marks while Turner-Yamamoto’s works, both paintings and sculptures, are also additive, and often change over time. Both artist’s works are analytical and in some ways scientific—they are based on a serious study of nature—but also gorgeous, evocative, contemplative and frankly sublime. There is no haughty disregard for nature here.  Instead what one encounters are thoughtful and spirited human intersections with the living world.