Atmospheric Series / Event #1 / Mixed Medium on Wood Panel / 2023
Los Angeles, California Dodd Holsapple
FRAGILITY
by Cynthia Penna (Curator)
Nature communicates through a non-explicit language that needs attention that often escapes our interpretive system due to superficiality. In this exhibition, an attempt is made to make Nature’s secret language explicit, focusing on the interference between Time and Nature and between Matter and Nature. The artists attempt to interpret the secret languages of trees, leaves, and the environment, trying to transcribe the often-ignored messages that the environment sends us.
Through a vast vocabulary of lines, marks, shapes, and colors found tout court in Nature, the artists are trying to focus on that subtle balance between Man and Nature that is made up of fragility and delicacy: a subtle balance that seems to have deteriorated but not yet completely broken.
Man and Nature live on the same complex of elements that we call planet or system, and this whole stands on a precarious balance.
Nature is already aware of the imbalance that is occurring and sends us messages: climate change, global warming, storms, and floods. These are all messages of a discourse undertaken by Nature toward human beings: messages of warning and a call for help at the same time.
The artists’ works are all bathed in an aura of bewilderment, in a disorienting atmosphere: Nature is depicted as wounded, contaminated, violated, and distorted. As guardians and gardeners of our environment, we must be aware of our destiny and penetrate the secret language that Nature communicates to us as a single texture made of air, water, and sunshine that are essential to our survival.
The impermanence of our earthly existence must not disorient or distort our purpose, which is to keep alive the subtle balance between human beings and the environment that surrounds them.
Creativity is the only answer because it is the only one that can bring forth and hold firm that fragile texture and balance between man and nature that allows us to survive.