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“Blue
Sky: Visionaries, Romantics, Dreamers” Opens at Pomona
College Museum of Art
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“Blue Sky: Visionaries, Romantics, Dreamers,” an exhibition
of the work of a select group of contemporary Southern
California artists, will be on view at the Pomona College
Museum of Art from January 20 through April 4. An opening
reception will be held at the Museum from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
on Saturday, January 24, with a music and dance party
provided by DJs DME beginning at 8:30 p.m.
Organized by Steve Comba, assistant director, and Rebecca
McGrew, curator, “Blue Sky” is the result of a labor of love
unique to the curatorial process. Having observed and
admired over several years the works of Russell Crotty,
Sharon Ellis, Nancy Jackson, Tom Knechtel, Kelly McLane,
Vally Mestroni and Hillary Mushkin – the artists included in
this exhibition – Comba and McGrew identified a theme that
would allow them to bring this extraordinary work together
at the Museum. “Blue Sky” materialized as an exploration of
how these artists employ fantastic or imaginary subject
matter to mediate the relationships between the unconscious
realm and the real world.
Defined as that which is idealistic, impractical, or
visionary, “Blue Sky” is a term also used by designers and
architects to denote the brainstorming, conceptual stage of
a project. The artists included in “Blue Sky” transform
their inner visions and experiences into something highly
inventive, and often painstakingly rendered, creating
idiosyncratic narratives that examine our ambivalent
relationship to nature and culture. Throughout the history
of art, artists have looked inward to the creative
imagination, in an attempt to comprehend the greater
mysteries of the universe through the extrapolation of dream
states and inventions of personal cosmologies and imaginary
realms. Others have turned their imaginative energy outward,
mining the fertile realm of history, popular culture,
science fiction and the scientific in order to make sense of
the social landscape. Through drawing, painting,
photography, sculpture and video, the artists in “Blue Sky”
examine ideas such as representation, Romanticism,
spirituality, and the sublime.
The exhibition, “Blue Sky,” is accompanied by a full-color
catalog with essays by Amy Gerstler and Christina Newhouse.
Gerstler’s essay follows this release.
The Pomona College Museum of Art is located in the
Montgomery Art Center, 330 N. College Avenue, Claremont. The
Museum is open to the public free of charge Tuesday through
Friday, from noon to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 1
to 5 p.m. For more information, call (909) 621-8283 or visit
the museum’s website at www.pomona.edu/museum.
(over)
Blue Sky: Visionaries, Romantics, Dreamers PAGE 2 OF 3
The Pomona College Museum of Art collects, preserves,
exhibits, and interprets works of art. The Museum houses a
substantial permanent collection as well as serving as a
gallery for the display of temporary exhibitions. Important
holdings include the Kress Collection of 15th- and
16th-century Italian panel paintings; more than 5,000
examples of Pre-Columbian to 20th-century American Indian
art and artifacts, including basketry, ceramics, and
beadwork; and a large collection of American and European
prints, drawings, and photographs, including works by
Francisco de Goya, José Clemente Orozco, and Rico Lebrun.
# # #
Seven Versions of Heaven
By Amy Gerstler
Is the sky always blue in heaven? Is the weather always
temperate there? Surely that kind of paradise would not
please or reward those who relish a drenching, dramatic
storm. “The heaven of each is but what each desires,” wrote
Thomas Moore, who believed not only in god but in the devil
as well. If Moore is right, then we human beings need
multiple, flexible interpretations of heaven—smeared
heavens, turbulent heavens, muddy autumnal heavens—maybe as
many heavens as there are wild minds to dream them up.
Can one of the myriad heavens we require be found in the
imagination—the soul’s cinema? If it’s possible that heaven
sometimes does emanate from our heads (the halo being one of
its wavery indications) then it’s also possible that heaven
could be reflected in the finest things our minds produce,
such as art. Like the visionary scenes and landscapes
offered by the seven artists in this exhibition, heavens can
be places we project ourselves, voluntarily, or
involuntarily (as in dreams) for pleasure and punishment,
for refuge or contemplation, for transformation, solace,
erasure and escape. Each of these seven artists reaches his
or her heaven—meaning here a fulfillment of the artist's
vision—as the poet says “by their own strange road.” This is
true even when the artist's “heaven” is an anti-paradise, a
hallucination, an absence, provisional and sketchy,
extremely earthy, transparent and ghostly, or a sort of
skeptics’ heaven in which the very idea of paradise is
coated in irony.
Russell Crotty’s heaven is derived from staring skywards.
There’s something earnest and grave about his work and the
devoted study of the firmament that fuels it. His globes are
factual and fantastic, literal and figurative, like the
beach ball representing the earth that Charlie Chaplin punts
around the room in his movie “The Great Dictator.” Doesn’t
all astronomy seem on some level like science fiction?
Crotty seems to remind us as he contemplates the vast solar
system with a kid’s avidness that we are smaller than we
think.
Many of Sharon Ellis’ eye popping, acid-trippy paintings
reveal fiery auras of connectedness between flora, ground
and sky. Peering into other paintings she has made gives the
eerie impression one is looking through a microscope at
cells and networks of blood vessels pulsing in one’s own
retinas. Everything in these paintings is molten, aglow,
wildly alive and in the process of mutating. Here we are
presented with what we are normally blind to—the pure
throbbing energy that underlies and magnetizes all of nature
and jumps from thing to thing in continual synapse. These
pieces read like photographs of nature at moments of orgasm.
(more)
Blue Sky: Visionaries, Romantics, Dreamers PAGE 3 OF 3
Doors and compartments spring open in Nancy Jackson’s images
of revelation. These doors to perception reveal worlds
within worlds, secret teeming universes. Bodies are pulled
open painlessly as shirtfronts, revealing hidden cities. A
lumbering figure crouches within an inscribed volcano,
ringed by primitive looking tree stumps, many of which
appear to have been bitten off. These paintings suggest
oracular narratives, and the allegories, metaphors and
symbols of alchemy, complete with mystic animals and
diagrams of occult systems.
Tom Knechtel’s work fuses an almost religious eroticism with
a ferocious yet highly civilized love of all that’s mortal
and earthy. His rich, gorgeously rendered paintings explode
with imagery, suggesting a world where thoughts, urges and
secret histories of men, plants, animals and objects
proliferate and are made visible in a great visual carnival.
The work vibrates with a kind of hyper aliveness and
sensuality that never let us forget how all that lives
blazes up, suffers and dies, sometimes again and again,
forever.
Kelly McLane’s palimpsests suggest a scene that is
materializing, or dematerializing, or perhaps both at the
same time. Multiple layers of transparent realities are
progressively lifted, yet we still can’t quite see through
the mists. In this heaven there is both lulling delicacy and
fog-shrouded threat. We sense a quiet beauty and a stilled,
pastel tinted terror. One feels a great yawning calm before
some darker kind of knowing inevitably seeping into these
pale vistas.
Vally Mestrioni’s hovering notations remind us that written
language and diagrams are kinds of choreography. These are
ethereal, between-worlds blueprints: maps in flux, sketches
of the actual waltzing with the potential. The poet Rainier
Maria Rilke, who wrote mostly in German, has a word in one
of his poems: nimmergekomene, which has sometimes been
translated as “one who never arrived.” These pieces are like
plans for notes on state of grace or comprehension that is
“ever arriving.”
Hillary Mushkin’s sensibility embraces irony and paradox and
ranges from finding beauty in the apocalyptic on into the
frisky and playful. What would heaven be without a sense of
humor and play? The “faux” and the “real” are presented as
equally charming, equally revered. This is a heaven in which
made things vie for pride of place with nature’s creations.
With an incredibly light and deft touch Mushkin animates a
little, perfectly framed world, a kind of Eden in which we
are forced to examine what’s dear to us, what we consider
amusing, beautiful, true.
So perhaps heaven isn’t a lofty floor in an impossibly high
skyscraper you ascend to via elevator after you die. Perhaps
it isn’t reached by rising like the mercury in an
old-fashioned glass thermometer poked under the tongue of
someone sweating with fever. Perhaps it is just all of the
above.
Amy Gerstler’s most recent book of poems, Medicine, was
published by Penguin Putnam in 2000. Her book Ghost Girl
will be published by Penguin in April 2004. Her previous
books include Crown of Weeds (Viking Penguin, 1997), Nerve
Storm (Viking Penguin, 1993) and Bitter Angel, (North Point
Press, 1990; Carnagie Mellon University Press 1997) which
won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has also
received a California Book Award and a Durfee Artists award
and has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.
These include The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry
Review, several volumes of Best American Poetry, and The
Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She does a
variety of kinds of journalism, and teaches in the
Bennington Writing Seminars Program in Bennington, Vermont,
and at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. |
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