Review: Commanding work on an unconventional canvas by a tribe of two
Most art is tribal art, when it comes down to it — an assertion of peoplehood, a manifestion of values. Even the most conceptual gesture amounts to flying one's flag.
The paintings on found fabric, metal and stone at New Image Art are made by the collaborative Land (Austin, Texas-based artists Caleb Owen Everitt and Ryan Rhodes), but they could easily be the banners of a scrappy, spirited nation that honors the sun, the four cardinal directions, fruits of the Earth and the essential tools of vessel and wheel. Call the work ethno/graphic design, perhaps. It has tremendous pictographic punch and invigorating earnestness.
"Altar Arrangement" (111 by 125 inches) is the largest piece in the show, and it’s a commanding example of Land's aesthetic of resonant simplicity. Five images are painted in eggshell and outlined in black on a coarse, spattered tarp. You see a bowl resting atop a stepped base, flowers whose crossed stems create the shape of a bell, a segmented circle, a vessel and a structure suggesting a draped platform for an offering. The painting hangs like a backdrop for the performance of some unknown rite. It defines its space as quasi-sacred.
Land speaks in icons and archetypes, a language separated only by a membrane of intent from that of logos and brand identity. It's all signage of a sort, declaiming what matters. In the starkly beautiful "Resting Mother," an air of worship encompasses the seated woman, the cross she holds, and the starry speckles surrounding her. In two other paintings, checkerboard floors and red carpets lead up to broken vessels isolated and elevated as if precious, holy.
The artists' materials pack as much potency as the images: military canvases stained and frayed, torn and patched, edged in grommets and hung by rusted nails, rope or wire; gold leaf; cracked plaster. As if salvaged from the "Swamp of Time" (as the show is titled), the pieces flirt with the aura of relics. Everything, whether found or made, wears the persuasive patina of age and use.
From the global, temporal soup emerge symbols redolent of Native American art. An installation of hay-bale stairs, wrapped like a secret in scuffed canvas and rope, looks slyly Surrealistic. Early modern geometric abstraction informs it all. The work has rich texture, not just in material but in art history. A tribe of two, Land practices a distinctly 21st century form of syncretism, melding the sacred and prosaic, the refined and the raw, the trappings of devotion and the principles of design.
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New Image Art, 7920 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. Through July 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. (323) 654-2192, www.newimageartgallery.com.
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