Claire Sherman: Palms Wild
@ Kavi Gupta Gallery
835 W Washington Blvd, Chicago, IL 60607
Opening Saturday, February 19th, from 4PM - 7PM
On view through Saturday, April 9th
Comprised of five massive landscape paintings, Palms Wild furthers Sherman‘s practice of representing how we conceive of nature.
Named in part after William Faulkner’s novel Wild Palms (1939) (doubly titled If I Forget Thee Jerusalem), Sherman’s works are similarly interstitial, nomads wandering a historical plain that divides the landscape of nature. Termed ‘the bifurcation of nature’ in his landmark The Concept Of Nature (1920), mathematician Alfred Whitehead shows how natural science in modernity conceived of nature as having matter as its primary substance and the Cartesian ‘secondary qualities’ or attributes by which we recreate nature as a representational system (e.g. Linnaean taxonomy or Humboldt’s tropical narratives).
Translated to aesthetic terms, Sherman’s works begs the question of whether the historical distinction between abstraction and representation is necessitated. As an example, one of Sherman’s new works Cactus (2010) takes the well-known Saguaro cactus that populates Arizona and Mexican Sonora as its subject. Popular in roadside neon signs and various other cultural ephemera, the cactus is known through an extensive system of signs as much as it is by its formal existence. Other works in Palms Wild include foreboding cave entrances and forestscapes that nod to German romantic Caspar David Friedrich, reminding us that in each work a brushstroke suggests the sublime complexity of the natural world and our attempt to understand it as image.
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