Between nature and art
By Burton Taylor
Lance Writer
January 30, 2008
 “…[Linnaeus] systematized his great work, Systema Naturae…The last category—Litteraria—was for everything that couldn’t be systematized,” said artist and poet Susan Gold to a rapt audience in a lecture at her current exhibition, Applied Science. It is an exhibition that investigates what happened to our scientific world-view when Litteraria—everything that cannot be systematized—is dropped off the page.
Gold, born in Detroit but now a Canadian, is a member of the University of Windsor’s Visual Arts faculty and has been an active artist for decades. She has had exhibitions at Galleries such as the Natural History Museum in London and numerous others both locally and in Europe. Her inspiration for this exhibition is in natural history collections found in Canada and Europe and the work of Linnaeus.
Eighteenth Century Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus was a scientist in a time when science was less estranged from art than it is now. He was a figure at the dawn of systemic science and the subsequent schism between science and art. Linnaeus was a scientific mind who still embraced artistic “practices of observation and representation” to understand the world.
Applied Science is composed of two installations, Inside the Trophy Room and No Space. But this is not a Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. These two installations interweave more than Big Boi and Andre did in those halcyon days of Outkast. Each installation occupies one half the gallery’s symmetrical space and addresses different aspects of science’s and art’s estrangement.
Inside the Trophy Room is collection of oil paintings and other miscellany that invokes the time of Linnaeus. Many of the images are inspired by Linnaeus’s home in Sweden. It is a section, Gold says, that touches on the history of oil painting and the history of western science.
No Space considers the “in between space of nature and of art.” Much of it is composed of photographs of dioramas with sketch-like painted overlays of flora. These painted organic flourishes invoke a delicacy of aesthetic that contrasts wonderfully with the austere sense of place found in Trophy Room. From terrestrial images of dioramas below up to soaring terns and swans above, the western wall of No Space belies the actual size of the space with a sense of the sublime. This wall alone justifies the time it takes to walk/drive/Segway your way over to the gallery to see this exhibit.
Despite the inclusion of a few foreign fauna, such as a tiger and a zebra, there is still a strong sense of Canadian wilderness in the exhibition. Like fellow Canadian Robert Bateman, the depictions of wildlife are quietly haunting, yet might be strange to younger generations of Canadians who are more familiar with Lolcats and the Bell beavers than with wildcats and weasels.
The exhibit depicts an aspect of our environment that has been rendered as invisible to us as the University’s rabbits who, after a snowfall, embroider the ground with the tracks we find as we hurry to our morning classes.
As the ghost-like portrait of the artist and a bust of Linnaeus, the exhibit is coyly asking us to consider our relationship to nature, science, and knowledge, or the what McKay called the “place / between memory and desire, some back porch / we can neither wish for nor recall.”
The installations are currently on display at Artcite, an intimate artist-run gallery currently celebrating its 25th anniversary, located in downtown Windsor at 109 University Ave. W. (on the corner of University and Pelissier) and runs Wed. through Sat, 12-5 p.m. and is on display till Feb. 2. The artist’s personal website is www.nobelpeaceproject.com.
|
