JOIN
DONATE

City Gallery Exhibits the Elements

Leah Andelsmith | April 16th, 2019

City Gallery Exhibits the Elements

Arts & Culture  |  Visual Arts

 

Version 2-1
"Explosive" by Nancy Eisenfeld. Leah Andelsmith photos.

The painting is a wash of dark colors, but the orange plumes across a dark background suggest a volcano erupting. White plumes of smoke billow across a sky already grey with ash, the ink pooling in organic shapes. In one corner, there’s a circular pattern of black dots, like a sneaker print or a tire tread: the touch of human-made objects in the midst of the wild volcano.

“Explosive” is one a dozen pieces in Nancy Eisenfeld’s Circumstances Beyond Control, on view at City Gallery through April 28. The collection of new work by the artist explores the natural world and the impacts of climate change through ink paintings on film, collage, and found-material sculpture.

Eisenfeld is “a wild art cook,” according to her long-time friend and colleague Meg Bloom, another of City Gallery’s artists. Eisenfeld works primarily with acrylic inks, but she will sometimes mix in sand or mica to add sparkle or depth.

“She uses everything and the kitchen sink,” said Bloom on a recent Saturday. “She’s always experimenting.”

When creating sculptures, Eisenfeld often starts with a piece of wood and “goes from there,” said Bloom, working the piece in an intuitive and process-oriented way and drawing from a huge cache of odd bits and loose ends she’s collected over the years.

DSC_0018

“Whimsical” makes good use of a handful of those random treasures, looking for all the world like an anthropomorphized, post-apocalyptic microscope. Short, frayed lengths of rope or wire act like hair and the folds of rust-red paper or fabric at the base recall leather boots or chaps.

The way the hair streams out makes the figure seem wild and free, as if riding out in the desert. The narrow skull of an animal is incorporated into the design, adding an organic element. The work seems to point to the way our bodies are increasingly intertwined with the machines we use, and suggests that that relationship will continue long after those machines have rusted.

DSC_0022

In contrast, the title piece of the exhibition focuses squarely on the forces and elements of nature. “Circumstances Beyond Control” is a collection of twelve paintings, each one composed of washes of pure, vibrant color, in which form is only the barest suggestion and the viewer’s imagination creates the story.

A wash of blue in shades from aqua to midnight creeps along the side of a painting, tipped with a grey curl and threatening to topple like a tsunami.

A superstorm builds into the shadowy cone of a tornado, bright swaths of cerulean cutting through the sky like pain.

A deep burnt-orange spreads from the bottom of the picture towards the center, as if a fire is spreading up a hillside towards blotches of green and brown like living trees about to be consumed.

A trickle of ultramarine ink meanders across the frame like a river, it’s vivid blue seeping out to flood the banks alongside, one washed-out and bleached, the other covered in swirling gold-flecked dust.

In each frame of “Circumstances Beyond Control”—and in the exhibition as a whole—there is a call back to the elements, to water, fire, sky, and dust. The viewer knows that much of the turmoil depicted is a result of environmental degradation and climate change, but the human hand is nowhere in sight.

Instead, the work feels as if these elements are composing themselves on the paper to star in their own drama. To sing their own song of agony and mourning, of rage and confusion and despair.

Bloom said that deep, intuitive connection with nature is an important part of who Eisenfeld is as an artist. She “may have an idea of a storm and then she just goes with the process,” letting the work unfold underneath her hands.

“Nancy spends a lot of time outside and the images are in her,” said Bloom. “She just discovers as she goes along.”