LEAVING ALONE, LIVING TOGETHER:
Anne Austin Pearce’s Necessary Contradictions by Jamilee Lacy
As the subject depicted in the earliest human renderings, painted and scratched onto the walls of prehistoric caves, Nature with a capital N—that is, fauna, flora, the sky, the land, the sea, and beyond—held special significance, not only to the artists imitating it, but to their immediate society. Plants and animals, as well as being food, were (and often still are) seen as earthly incarnations of religious deities or valued spirits that guided humans in this world and the next. Indeed, Nature is the universe in most cosmic and spiritual narratives: in Greek mythology, Gaia, or Mother Earth, made herself out of primordial chaos to shelter, feed, and nurture all future creation. With his observation of nature just beneath a Bodhi tree, prince Siddhartha, who was to become Buddha, found enlightenment, which allowed the spirit to move between heaven and earth freely. Within many indigenous cultures of the Americas, humans are the land and the sea… the earth is the mind of the people, just as we are the mind of the earth.
If not explicitly sacred, human relations with the living beings and matter around them have always been complex. Scientific thought in the modern era has not necessarily simplified things. Although Charles Darwin’s view of the natural world, regarded as radical in his time, is now widely accepted, cultural critics today undoubtedly judge his criteria for “trueness” as outdated. Since Darwin’s time, the rapid and continual rise of industrialization and the built and/or altered environment has permanently changed the relationship between humans and Nature. Per the International Union of Geological Sciences, the professional organization in charge of defining Earth’s time scale, we are officially in the Holocene, or “entirely recent,” epoch, which began nearly 12,000 years ago after the last major ice age. However, because of the rapid change in the planet’s make-up, that label is outdated, some experts say. They argue for “Anthropocene”—from anthropo, for “man,” and cene, for “new”—because humankind has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluted the oceans and altered the atmosphere, among other lasting impacts. If Nature represents all that is living and eternal in the framework of spirituality, it represents all that is fleeting and dying within the framework of modern science, especially in this age of climate change (and global warming denial).
As gorgeous and dazzling as her artwork is, Anne Austin Pearce deeply understands the cultural contradictions of Nature, and her every creation demonstrates the joys and sorrows of those contradictions. Merging visual manifestations of the mystical, intellectual, and anthroposcenic, Anne Austin Pearce’s Leaving Alone presents Nature as a sublime entity that is at once vast and omnipotent yet intimate and fragile. Considered within Nature’s cultural contexts, Pearce’s work deals with themes original to the Romantic era—scenic vistas and overgrown native and exotic flora express the inherent power and beauty of nature to set scenes of the Sublime. But unlike the artists of Romanticism, who primarily produced painting, prose, and poetry to oppose the strictly symmetrical, formal gardens and landscapes held dear by the aristocracies of the West, she conjures a universal tale. She culls imagery from the distinct locales to and from which she travels around the world, juxtaposing what may be the wind-whipped grass and cloud-dotted sky of the Kansas prairie and a pile of auburn leaves fallen from a Missouri sugar maple with the almost chemical-colored, bulbous and sinewy forms of what are perhaps Caribbean coral reef or clusters of subtropical Kenyan Blood Lilies. With each formal and conceptual reference, she establishes a play with visuality and narrative: One can speak of many of Pearce’s compositions in terms of multifaceted mythical landscapes and how they connect and diverge into inescapably fragmented and elusive stories.
“Persephone’s Blaze,” a four-part series of ink, acrylic and collage abstractly depicting each of the four seasons on large paper, is indicative of the artist’s interest in the intersection of her own working methods with bits and pieces of the annals of so-called canonical art and literature. The idea of analogizing the seasons is not new—examples can be found in the frescos of ancient Rome, in the Old Masters’ painting retelling pagan and bible stories, and most famously in Alphonse Mucha’s Art Nouveau masterpieces, “The Seasons.” Yet unlike her art historical predecessors’ representation of the seasons in successive harmony, Pearce’s depiction of the cycle of nature is more truthful with its display of coinciding beauty and violence. She shows spring as the time when the world awakens from the long, deathly sleep of winter. It is therefore a transition period, between the past of winter and the hope of summer, between memory and desire. It draws comparisons with the famous poem The Wasteland, in which T.S. Eliot catches this both exciting and sinister period of transition:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Of course, Pearce’s seasons register as sinister beneath their vibrant color palette and energetic line work because their title is drawn from Greek mythology’s tale of Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and the harvest goddess Demeter. Abducted by Hades to become his bride in the underworld, she is an apt metaphor for Nature’s historical dichotomies and impending calamity in her personification of vegetation, which shoots forth from underneath in spring, sets the world ablaze with summer heat, and withdraws into the earth with cold despair after humanity divests Earth of her fruits.
Central to Pearce’s ideation and visual manifestations are the stories and voices of others. From Greek mythology to Modernist poetry and Art Nouveau symbolist painting to twenty-first century organic abstraction, she builds allegiances with art histories and artists, sometimes directly and collaboratively, other times through subtle nods and winks to current issues, recent fiction and artistic contemporaries. In Leaving Alone, there are several significant artworks that integrate the ideas and techniques of other artists and thinkers. “Growler, An Animal Opera,” a large-scale sound and found-object installation containing a taxidermic bear, takes inspiration from world-renowned writer and environmental activist Margaret Atwood’s poem “The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return to Their Origins.” Although the artwork was wholly conceived by Pearce, the final presentation is naught without the assistance of Nick Carroll, who carefully engineered the animal sounds Pearce sourced from the Animal Sound Archive at Museum für Naturkunde Berlin into a 43-track recording. This soundtrack embodies Pearce’s munificent calibration of her community’s talent and, coincidentally and poetically, evokes the cacophonous choruses one imagines hearing aboard Noah’s Ark. And the gorgeously cannibalistic stop-animation yet, it knows hunger was produced with Barry Anderson, another prominent Kansas City artist who, besides being Pearce’s long-time friend and frequent sounding board, makes artwork about the profound relationship between landscape and experience. Such references to and cooperation with other artists and creative proliferation situates Pearce’s work alongside great contemporary artists and naturalists like Firelei Báez, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, and Sarah Sze, and others whose output visually and conceptually emphasizes the interconnectedness of makers with each other, with diverse communities, and with built and natural environments near and far. With each linkage, Pearce communicates that while we may leave this world alone, we will always inhabit it together.
Where painting and drawing are concerned, Pearce translates ideas of growth and transformation using an additive process. Signs and gestures are patiently layered, deposited on paper surfaces one by one. She exemplifies this approach in her series Never-Ending Things, which condenses a range of painterly effects—sunbursts and storm clouds, raindrops and snowflakes, green and red leaves—falling through a composition minutely subdivided by the twisting, veiny black branches of an uncannily brain-like underwater tree-form. Various materials usually considered out of sync, such as water-based inks and alkyd enamels, collide into stormy expanses. Pearce makes pairings of comparatively stubborn and inflexible substances and exploits to great effect in sequences of maneuvers that oscillate between mimesis and wanton psychedelia. Fussy brushwork alternates with almost aleatory passages where the paint is pooled and swirled into dark oceanic abysses, and then dotted with raised and shimmering rain-like droplets. With the series’ density and titling structure (i.e. Blue Sea 1, Black Sea 2, et cetera), Never-Ending Things implies that the world will never end or cease exist. It will continue to deepen and darken; its matter will die and transform into new matter. We humans may make ourselves extinct while Nature—that infinitely exacting and ethereal phenomena—self-corrects to transcend the Anthropocene epoch. Regardless, Earth will go on.
Pearce’s works on paper are not without a lighter side, and an enthusiasm for the materiality of art plays a large role in her making methodology. The artist’s apparent revelry in the way paint splashes, runs and marbleizes on paper conveys an energy for looking and doing that is contagious. Even in such seemingly innocuous aspects, Pearce knowingly plays with formal dichotomies, as the works shuttle between abstraction and figuration with dizzying ease. Her use of perspective, which often involves radical shifts in scale, is a kind of formal wizardry. It can also be understood as a vehicle for thematic meaning. The unstable, or mobile, points of reference throughout the work signal a multitude of positions that exemplify not only the artist’s own whimsicality and passion for experimentation, but also her increasingly global outlook.
Exuberance aside, Pearce’s use of perspective and amorphous form also implies the ever-shifting ground of an environment in crisis in this post-truth era. Take for example, Icarus, the large-scale collaged wall mural the artist painstaking constructed over a two-year period. Titled after the character and parable in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the mural, like the story, is read as a cautionary tale and moral instruction against human hubris: Icarus, wearing wings of feathers and wax, disregards his father’s directions to avoid flying too high and too close to the hot sun. The wax melts, the wings come undone, and the young man plummets to the sea, where he drowns. Although Icarus is swiftly punished for his self-indulgent behavior and failure to recognize the precariousness of one’s human condition, he experiences a brief flash of total euphoria, oblivious of whether he’s going up or down. Pearce’s abstract rendering of the story, with its ascending and descending joyful explosions of fragmented color, metallic, and pattern, centralizes this psychologically ambiguous moment. The work begs the questions: did Icarus die in ecstasy or agony? Or in the grand analogized sense, is human advancement with its intrinsic pleasure, however fleeting, worth sacrificing every other earthly thing?
In ways both thematically explicit and formally buried, Pearce’s Leaving Alone is a complex microcosm at once personal, collective, political, mystical, alchemical, jubilant, and devastating. In bringing disparate references together by way of methods quintessentially her own, the artist shows us that we live in a complicated age and that, as artists, environmentalists, and humanists of the time, we must plumb the depths of the contradictions between spirituality and science, between empiricism and the ideal, and between ecological safety and societal betterment. In what is perhaps the smallest but most poignant artwork in the exhibition, Moth(ER)arium, a biomorphic glass vessel Pearce designed to house and protect moth cocoons and their mini-ecologies of rocks, branches and leaves, dispatches the audience with her most important message: The relationship a human has with living organisms and the environment should be a sacred and passionate one. As the only relationship that truly matters, we must build an all-encompassing safe-haven for Nature in our hearts and minds and out in the world.
Jamilee Lacy
Jamilee Lacy is Director and Curator of Providence College Galleries in Rhode Island. She curates and writes about contemporary art, design, and literature as they relate to urbanism, networks, and/or intermediality.