View: Cara Despain & Jackie Berry Art Talk

Throughout the summer, hazy, smoke-filled skies were a palpable reminder of a devastating fire season. Locally, Parleys Canyon now holds a visible burn scar after a fire that forced the evacuation of thousands of local residents. And all across the West, heat waves and historic drought conditions have often combined with decades of insufficient land management, creating ripe conditions for millions of acres to burn.

 For the past three years, Cara Despain has been making work that responds to this crisis. Using burnt debris she collects from wildfires across the western United States, she creates ‘paintings’ of pure carbon—dark, saturated fields that memorialize these increasingly destructive events. The artist has written that the works “serve as markers of a changing climate and exist in memoriam of the consequences of human habitation on the planet.”

These paintings fit into a larger body of work in which Despain has explored the West, interrogating issues such as land use, land ownership, and the sustained consequences of frontierism. Here she offers a critical lens on the history of American landscape painting and considers the ways in which it was often used to idealize western territories, typically for expansionist purposes. Today, she notes, the lands in these romantic depictions have been permanently parceled, claimed, altered, and scarred. 

Despain thinks of the Carbon Paintings as landscape paintings of the new American West. Smelling of smoke and shedding ash, they are an overwhelming visualization of large-scale systems change. 

Cara Despain bio:

Cara Despain is an artist working in film and video, sculpture, photography and installation addressing issues of land use, the desert, climate change, visualizing the Anthropocene, land ownership and the problematics of frontierism. She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah (1983) and currently lives in Miami, Florida and works between the two. She holds a BFA from the University of Utah (2006). In 2012, she was selected for the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Award in the visual arts, and in 2016 she was selected for the South Florida Consortium Fellowship. Her work is included in Rubell Family Collection and the Scholl Collection, as well as the State of Utah and Salt Lake County art collections. Recent exhibitions include FROM DUST at the Southern Utah Museum of Art, it doesn’t look like paradise anymore at Southern Oregon University; FREE!. at Brickell City Center, Miami; Cryin’ Out Loud at the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, Fringe Projects, Miami, Slow Burn at Spinello Projects, Miami; and No Man’s Land at Rubell Family Collection, Miami. She was the Art Director for the feature length film The Strongest Man that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (2015), as well as A Name Without a Place which premiered at the Miami International Film Festival (2019). A short documentary about her and her work aired on Art Loft, WPBT and PBS and screened at the Miami International Film Festival (2016). She was selected for a 2018 Ellie’s Award through Oolite Arts to produce her own first feature film and video installation hybrid, and this year will be completing a public art commission for the Underline with Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. Writing and research play a major role in all of her creative work, and she often works very site-specifically— researching, casting objects, or writing in the field. Recent residencies include Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Colorado, Feminist Summer Camp at Birch Creek Ranch in central Utah (which she co-facilitates), and Signal Fire Wide Open Studios field research program in the four corners area. 

Join Us for a virtual Art Talk with Claire Sherman on Wednesday, November 17, 2021. 

How does an artist engage with the long history of landscape painting in the 21st century? What makes it relevant to our contemporary experience? Claire Sherman grapples with these questions, pushing against the romanticism of the genre and depicting landscapes as they gradually dissolve into abstraction. Her invented scenes of forests, caves, rocks, and grasses—composites of found imagery that she has collected over time, or synthesized from her photographs—are ultimately not interested in a truthful representation of place, but instead attempt to address our larger relationship with both the natural world and with contemporary media.

Sherman’s scenes are strangely seductive, beckoning us into the immersive, visceral quality of the large-scale canvases. The ubiquity of her imagery lends them coherency yet, upon approach, they collapse. What was a stem, trunk, or rock from afar turns into painterly exuberance; details decompose into abstracted lines and planes of paint. Sherman excels at extending this tension between the landscape’s illusory depth and a gestural mark-making, drawing attention to the inherent flatness of each painting’s surface. Occupying this in-between space, she focuses on the intimacy and immediacy of her works, wanting them to relate to our current moment, to the here now.

Claire Sherman Art Talk

Claire Sherman bio:

Claire Sherman received her B.A. from The University of Pennsylvania and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has completed residencies at the Terra Foundation for American Art, the MacDowell Colony, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Yaddo, The Albers Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at PATRON Gallery, Chicago; DC Moore Gallery, NY; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; KMAC Museum, Louisville; Houldsworth Gallery, London; DCKT, New York; Aurobora, San Francisco; and Hof and Huyser Gallery, Amsterdam. Recent group exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland; Sun Valley Museum of Art, Ketchum, Idaho; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Suburban Riverwest, Milwaukee; Gallery Seomi, Seoul; The New Gallery, Austria; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY. Sherman is an Associate Professor at Drew University and is represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York and PATRON Gallery in Chicago.

David Hartt: On Exactitude in Science (Watts) presents the artist’s most recent film with a selection of related photographs. Asked to consider the notion of Black space during a recent Museum of Modern Art commission, Hartt looked to Charles Burnett’s seminal 1978 film, Killer of Sheep, which took place in Los Angeles’ historically Black neighborhood of Watts. Hartt powerfully juxtaposes Burnett’s anecdotal memories of the neighborhood with an almost clinical examination of spatial archetypes, part of the artist’s ongoing analysis of the ideologies embedded within our built environment.

David Hartt analyzes the built environment, using it as a proxy to explore diverse ideological perspectives. He asks, what are the connections between a community and the spaces it occupies? Who is invested in a site, and how? Which ideas are made visible, and which remain hidden? With a practice that involves extensive research, his work aims to reveal the dynamics of a site while unpacking how it relates to both historical and contemporary conversations surrounding politics, economics, and race. 

In On Exactitude in Science (Watts), Hartt explores the built environment of Los Angeles’ historically black neighborhood, where there are lasting cultural histories of both empowerment and subjugation. He places his work in conversation with Charles Burnett’s seminal 1978 film, Killer of Sheep, which notably took place in Watts. Creating a fragmented filmic portrait of the neighborhood as it exists today, Hartt explores current-day examples of the same kinds of archetypal spaces (kitchen, parlor, street, and so on) used in Burnett’s film. His detached, clinical examination of space is contrasted by anecdotal narration provided by Burnett. Meanwhile, the film’s unusual vertical orientation and its juxtaposition of unhurried, fixed camera shots and sudden dramatic shifts draws attention to small, seemingly inconsequential details, ultimately allowing the complexity of the site to be grasped. Layering what Watts was then and now, Hartt brings needed focus to the question of Black authorship within the built environment. 

How does Hartt’s methodical and contemplative analysis allow you to better see and understand the built environment in which you live?

Public Programming:

Hartt’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others. Hartt lives and works in Philadelphia where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.