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Arterial
Organic Intersections of the New
Cityscape
Curatorial Essay by Jeremy M. Johnsen, Artist
and Show Manager
The modern cityscape offers a vision of complex contradictions, wherein
idealized structures tower above their wild predecessors to assert the
transcendence of man. Though the binary distinction between that which is
natural and that which is artificial is a root thought, as fundamental to man’s
understanding of his environment as the concepts of self and other, experience
and insight may yet render the notion a vestigial fallacy. In a time when we
find ourselves at odds with an artificial environment that emerged from our
desire to dominate, plan and progress, we may need to re-examine our role in the
greater whole. Has the industriousness of man taken on a life of its own,
perpetuated by something as fundamental as survival instinct or as complex as
GDP? Can we continue to harbor the notion that the man-made world is nature
augmented by the mind of man, or must we consider the urban landscapes an
extension of our collective body, growing as it will? Are we doomed to cancerous
metastasis? Or do we usher in a deceptive sort of destruction that will make a
chrysalis of the Earth?
The dialogue between man and his environment is ever-changing and at every turn
of phrase he has paraphrased through myth and art. The conversation has been
spoken in many languages and captured in countless images, but within the
nuanced milieu there are as many universals as there are variations. Myriad
cultures, with no connection in written history, made the night and its moon
feminine, the day and its sun masculine. Likewise, trees on every continent
stretched to the heavens as a symbol of man’s divine knowledge and lamentable
mortality. Some 20,000 years ago, around the time of the first agricultural
settlements, small statues depicting the exaggerated features of a pregnant
woman, such as the positivisticly titled Venus of Willendorf, were buried
in fields across Europe, Africa and Asia, to infuse the land with man's
providential fecundity. Much later, in Mesopotamia, the first known cities of
the world boasted great ziggurats to anthropomorphic gods, connected by wheel
trodden arteries to hasten the flow of progress around them. Later still, in
Greece, the Western world was born in an explosion of idealism that deified
roads, commerce and many of man's machinations. So it went, from empire to
empire, an ever-changing mask on the face of the planet.
After the industrial revolution of the early 19th century, scientific advances
began an exponential climb; offering greater and greater insight into natural
design and turning mankind's mythic gaze more and more narcissistic. In the late
19th century, Seurat's Chromoluminarism (Pointillism) reflected new-found
knowledge regarding properties of light and revealed the world in terms of
quanta. In the early 20th century, as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr were
uncovering god-like knowledge and the world was propelling with unprecedented
speed toward the worst war it had ever seen, the Futurist art movement
proclaimed man's final victory over nature. The works of Futurism mythologized
locomotives and instruments of war with a sense of wonderment not unlike that of
early man's contextualizations of nature. Then, as the First World War was
drawing to a close, the Neoplasticism of the Di Stijl movement asserted the
superiority of man-made systems and the spiritual transcendence of all things
artificial.
Today, artists continue to engage their environment in a meaningful discourse.
Many of the new storytellers of the Western world share a mythological
vocabulary that represents a kind of fallout from that first explosion in
Greece. While artists' methods and their opinions are as varied as ever, certain
trends emerge from the instances. More and more, we see expressions that ponder
the interconnectedness of all life; the folly of Manifest Destiny and Eminent
Domain's providential expansion; and the realization that all things, artificial
and natural, are inextricably connected.
The Artists
 Jeff
Koegel combines the Japanese, wabi-sabi aesthetic of imperfection and
impermanence with the idealized and perfected formal elements of western
aesthetics, to offer up a counter-intuitive vision that encompasses a sweeping,
cross-cultural history of technological development. This style is influenced,
in part, by 19th century Japanese printmaker, Hiroshige, whose Fifty-three
Stations of the Tokaido (scenes on the highway connecting Edo and Kyoto)
captured the landscapes of a rapidly changing Japan in the late Edo
Period--during which the ruling Tokugawa shogunate was slowly losing a battle to
preserve Japanese culture amidst pressures from Western nations to open the
country to foreign trade. Though Koegel alludes to elements of this Ukiyo-e
style, meaning “pictures of the floating world” or, its ironic homophone,
“sorrowful world,” his paintings utilize a distinctly contemporary visual
vocabulary that references mankind’s current environmental discourse. In one of
Koegel’s vast, contradictory landscapes, spanning space and time, smoke stacks
or volcanoes might emit noxious, billowing clouds that trace the outline of a
futuristic space ship, a fantastic cityscape, an ancient temple or vascular
forms that could be tree trunks, ventricles, or a cross section of metropolitan
plumbing. Uniting all of these disparate elements is the artist’s color-field
style of layering; the whole milieu of contradictory formal elements is fused
into a holistic composition by solid fields of warm reds, oranges and yellows
that suggest the heat and function of interdependent, internal organs, or cool
washes of blue, white and violet that call to mind ocean and sky meeting on a
distant and apparently united horizon.
 Christopher
Santer’s paintings utilize elements of massive highway systems to impart a
subtle mixture of speed, complexity, alienation and loss of control, in an era
of unbridled technological advancement and a constantly accelerating environment
of commerce, culture, lifestyles and information. By incorporating the romantic
language of the mythologized “American Dream,” in painted letters that traverse
his highway scenes like the words of Beat legend, Jack Kerouac, Santer captures
the freedom and possibility offered by the open, American road. Though his works
have a hopeful element that seems to sympathize with post baby-boom optimism, he
always brings us back to reality, playfully chiding us for our hubris, by
referencing the insurmountable power of natural forces. In some works, romantic
phrases trail of toward the horizon only to be swept up by a tornado or dropped
into a canyon from the edge of a road to nowhere; In others, highways, those
facilitators of speed, connectivity and efficiency, entangle in confusing knots
that resemble the unchecked growth of an asphalt heartworm.
 Brian
Scott Campbell creates works that explore the manipulation of natural
environments through man-made devices. This work is employed in several mediums;
including painting, drawing, sculpture and animation. Drawing much of his
inspiration from Rube Goldberg cartoon illustrations, Campbell presents the
viewer with a world that is, at once, organic and industrial, as well as
whimsical and fantastical. Entanglements of individually deliberate, yet
collectively haphazard lines create complex arterial networks that could be
highways, viruses, or both. These systematic patterns occupy an intentionally
sparse composition, leaving them isolated; floating in space, connected only to
themselves. While these works suggest a kind of pessimism, Campbell’s more
sculptural works suggest a silver lining or, perhaps, a punch-line; nearly
abstract jumbles of urban and rural landscapes congest wooden panels that are
cut into fluid, organic shapes, which seem to envelop their contents like a
membrane, suggesting some greater order to the chaos within. All-in-all, no
matter what the medium or interpretation, Campbell’s works engage us in a tricky
conversation about how and where we live.
All work, artist statements, and biographies can be viewed online at
www.viveza.com.
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