Art: Field Guides
Jackson Artworks group show explores alternative landscapes
By: Michael Joe Krainak
Issue: July 1, 2009
“Field Guide”
Through Sunday, July 5
Jackson Artworks
1108 Jackson St.
341-1832
Ever since Jackson Artworks in the Old Market reopened this year after a needed renovation, the venue has
offered several successful contemporary art shows under the guidance of director Christina Narwicz. The
current exhibit, “Field Guide,” which continues through this Sunday, July 5, may be its most significant group
show to date.
Group shows offer a unique challenge. Too often a venue will hang several disparate artists on its gallery walls
as if throwing darts and hoping a few will stand out and stick in a viewer’s memory. Or, a group of said artists
will decide it’s time to show and sell again, and the work displayed competes in more than one way. Enter a
curator and everything changes. Work begins to compliment as well as contrast, all around a visual motif or
theme. The show just jells, memorable unto itself.
This is the case with the four field guides in this exhibit, Nicholas Bohac, Matt Carlson, Sunny Gibbons and
Caolan O’Loughlin, who individually and collectively either “dismantle, magnify, research or resemble objects
or fragments” within several familiar and unfamiliar landscapes according to the exhibit’s statement. All of the
work here is two-dimensional painting whether acrylic on wood (Bohac, O’Loughlin), oil on canvas (Gibbons)
or gouache on paper (Carlson), and much of it is aesthetically pleasing as well as thoughtful and complex.
Overall, “Field Guide” is a good match for the venue’s new, urbane and sophisticated spaces.
Think of the four artists as guides themselves who explore various material and spiritual landscapes with
different points of view and styles. Bohac is the seer-archeologist who takes the viewer on a study of
humankind’s impact on the earth throughout history and its implications for tomorrow. O’Loughlin travels
alone, and records and comments on our presence and pressure on the current landscape even when we are
nowhere in or on site. Carlson is a psychoanalyst and researcher who takes us on head trips of a different kind.
Lastly, Gibbons is an explorer of the natural world in micro and macrocosm, a space and a bit of time traveler.
Much of the work overlaps, at least conceptually, as it shares natural, social, even spiritual themes, yet each
component stands on its own as well. Yet, it can also be said, as in the case of all worthy group shows, that
while the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, several individual pieces stand out, both as show pieces and
signature work as described below.
Bohac’s contribution to “Field Guide” displays a strong socio-political conscience and a sharp angular, graphic
and dynamic style. His geometrically reassembled landscapes are busy, but there is always a focal and entry
point in a carefully arranged, asymmetrical balance of subject and palette. Though he comments on our
technological and industrial impact on nature, his paintings are never didactic. Yet they are challenging,
structured physically as multiple pieces in a puzzle that ask the viewer to do the same mentally.
The artist’s two most imposing pieces here are probably the awkwardly titled “Mountain of Sound” and the
portentous “Potsdam Ultimatum.” The mountain in the former is one-half natural, made of granite, snow and
glacier, and one-half a motley heap of craggy rock and oil derricks. Below the peak are the at-risk foothills,
fertile and verdant on one side but barren and dotted with even more derricks on the other. Leading the
viewer’s eye to the mountain top is not a yellow brick road, exactly, but a rainbow ribbon of road lined with
telephone poles and, no doubt, the proverbial pipeline threatening to burst upon the scene.
“Potsdam Ultimatum,” with its satiric reference to the U.S. declaration of surrender or else given to Japan in
WWII prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is a mixed media acrylic and silkscreen on wood panel with collage.
With a landscape of snowy mountains, melting glaciers and foothills dominated by a Japanese, red-rising sun in
the background, this time it is global warming giving the ultimatum with the query: Is anybody paying
attention?
Like Bohac, O’Loughlin is also aware of his changing environment, but from a more distant and observant
POV. His landscapes are sparse and minimalist as they depict wide expanses populated only with energy and
communication icons, past, present and future. Less an alarmist or prognosticator, his panels feature telephone
poles and windmills in close proximity with wind turbines. In as much as these totems contrast in purpose and
efficiency, they seem quite at home with one another. The only thing missing are irrigation sprinklers, solar
panels and dishes.
In his most pictorial piece, the large horizontal “The Middle of Somewhere,” we have a Keith Jacobshagen
horizon minus the agricultural or pastoral setting. Instead, O’Loughlin works with sharp flat colors and planes
that only hint at spatial depth and make his icons pop even more. Bereft of people or home sites, is his work
suggesting that only our inventions will survive our intervention in the environment or does it merely observe
that technology must evolve and adapt ecologically if we are to survive in nature?
Carlson also explores our tenuous relationship with nature via industry and technology, but his landscapes are
more introspective and conceptual. Ever since his marvelous show with Philip Faulkner, “Vision/re-Envision”
in Bemis Underground, Carlson has interpreted this theme through a number of parallels/contrasts: the cerebral
and the ornamental, the organic and the artificial and objective and the subjective.
Though his work in the BU show was more plentiful and immediate, a single work here, “A Tangle from this
Straight Line,” in gouache on paper, continues his signature precise, geometric and mosaic style that resembles
a digital print. More intellectual and esoteric than other pieces here, it aptly features two floating heads, each a
tangled mass of grass and vine, and tentatively connected only by jumbled wire. Intended or not, the “talking
heads” imagery, as well as a persistent digital motif elsewhere, suggests a struggle for any kind of connection
with the natural world, let alone each other or even ourselves. Instead, we are both distanced and attached by
more “personal” forms of digital communication whether we e-mail, text, Twitter or Facebook, ad nauseum.
Eschewing the conceptual and esoteric, Gibbons reaches out to the multitudes and to a landscape of cosmic
proportions. Her large and midsize oils on canvas are bold, abstract and atmospheric, each of which boasts
bright hues in waves of overlapping and undulating lines. Because they are frameless, each pulsating pattern
appears as a microcosm of some larger solar system or as a fragment of the natural world. The effect is
immediately sensual and expansive, a vision of inner and outer space similar to either or both Kubrick’s time
travel in “2001” or Julie Christie’s euphoric, opium-induced gaze into a small vase at the end of “McCabe and
Mrs. Miller.”
Consider Gibbon’s “Course” and “Ridge,” both of which vibrate with a judicious layer of white and yellow
beneath the pink and blue palette of the former and the orange—red of the latter. In “Course” we see or sense a
waterfall cascading over a red rock surface and “Ridge” burns like flowing lava or the interior of a campfire.
Because they lack an obvious focal point, the trip here is pleasurably hypnotic and transcendent. Whether in a
field of plenty, pollution, disorientation or dreams, with these four as our guides, we are in capable and
imaginative hands.