Sunsets are made redder, pinker, more beautiful by anthropogenic aerosols and forest fire particulates. The sun is never quite setting in Joan Nelson’s New Works on display at Adams and Ollman, but rendered in transitory positions before and after the iconic image of the sphere horizontally split. Instead, Nelson draws our attention to the particularities of sublime sunsets by focussing on the particles themselves. Water vapor of unknown geysers, coastal fog, and iridescent plumes of volcanic smoke, these atmospheres hold and refract light at a distance from their source.
In one of the ten untitled pieces, the view of a distant mountain range is obscured by a pillar of smokey pigment dense with glitter. Particles of rare earth thrust into flight. In another painting, a splotchy beam of fluorescent indigo is vertically projected from an unknown direction, possibly a gush of water but sci-fi interpretations are not quickly dismissed. Untitled (2024) depicts a triad of red meteors flying through an open sky, nothing in their path but the molten ground below. These active landscapes are safely mediated—less of a disaster, more of a coming home. Atmospheric insolubles sparkle forever.
The projectiles within Nelson’s New Works glimmer with the distant but engrossing quality of fiction. It’s the speculative glimmer of an unpeopled extinction, by force of a meteor shower or chemical asphyxiation. It is unclear whether this extinction is looming or might’ve passed. It’s the gleam of an event that could’ve happened, was almost certain that it would, but didn’t. The scintillating aura of an event relegated to a distant history, the temporal space of speculation where individuals retreat to wash their hands of responsibility or otherwise claim too much of it.
In 1986, the beloved art critic Gary Indiana wrote that landscape paintings of the day “reflect[ed] our contemporary relationship to nature, which is framed by our distance from it. Nature no longer serves as a source of the sublime. It exists as a variegated substance continually acted on by the human presence.”1 Realist painters of the post-industrial era, including Nelson, used the frame to report on environmental degradation that was largely ignored by Reagan-era politics. They attempted to incite a sense of urgency. The landscape of our planet has been in crisis for over forty years. And we know it. What does that leave a landscape painter to work with?
Noticeably more abstract than the others, one square canvas is sedimented over with layers of glitter, glass beads, and tourmaline pigments. With no concrete referent, the source or sense of its glimmer is indiscernible. One could hope that this is a view from inside a sunset. But even the most recognizable compositions keep reality at bay. The foreground of one piece is dominated by craggy desert rock forms. A flat swath of sand separates this formation from another. Above, the sky is crowded with improbably translucent orbs of uniform circumference, disrupting a congruous sense of scale as they drift into silvery mountains in the background. Untethered to an existing time or place, the New Works hover in perpetuity in a future/past/alternative-oriented imaginary. The only time that is glaringly absent is the present.
But Nelson’s aversion to being present is not a failure. It’s an incisive maneuver to linger in a moment of questioning. Amidst a dominating cultural aesthetic of immediacy that demands the certainty of facts and the fullness of embodied presence, Nelson’s landscapes are a critical suspension of urgency. In their hypothetical glow lies a restive impulse to pull back and retreat to lesser known internal landscapes, and a curiosity to question what might be found there.
Volcanoes populate several of the new works. Vermillion seethes from them, signaling an indeterminate dormancy. There is at least one eruption, but at most four. This world is deep in metamorphosis. Calderas are respiring and mesas glow. The land is seemingly undergoing “its own ecstatic process of self-actualization,” claims the exhibition text, giving plentiful signs of life without people in it. Contrary to liberal environmentalist convention, the forest is not the symbol of abundance here, but a region of stone. Stone is not alive, yet in these canvases it has all the sweet freedoms still owed to many in the strata of the living. I envy the stone that self-actualizes.
Nelson’s landscapes continue to frame our changing relationship to nature, but this time the frame situates us outside the enclosures of crisis-realism where the human presence is read through industrial sludge, agrarian softening, and nuclear fallout. We are instead transported to a quasi-event2, sort of here and sort of now, in the imaginary. Here, we are blissful in a time and place where people don’t exist and the land is capable of everything we ever wanted for ourselves.
Joan Nelson: New Works
Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon
April 6 to May 18, 2024
- Indiana, G. (2018). Landscape Today, December 16, 1986. In Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns 1985-1988 (pp. 355–357). essay, semiotext(e). ↩︎
- “The quasi-event is only ever hereish and nowish and thus asks us to focus our attention on forces of condensation, manifestation, and endurance rather than on the borders of objects.” Povinelli, E. A. (2016). Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (pp. 21). Duke University Press.
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This review was made possible thanks to the support of our Art Writing Champion lumber room. Learn more about Variable West Art Writing Champions here.