Denature at the Linda Hummel-Shea ArtSpace at Northern Essex Community College, Haverhill, MA February 13 - March 15, 2023
Natural imagery collides with the fantastical and technological in “Denature”, a group show of artwork by Carla Fisher Schwartz, Yuko Oda, Michelle Samour, and Nadya Volicer, curated by Michelle Carter. In drawings, reliefs, and installations, carefully observed natural forms become unfamiliar as they deteriorate, transform, and explode - or even reveal themselves to be fakes. Meditations on beauty merge with complex feelings about the future, like apprehension about irrevocable environmental loss, or excitement about potential adaptations and new forms. All four artists work in both two dimensions and three dimensions, and precise, intricate hands-on processes are central to their methods. Techniques include papermaking, pen and ink drawing, digital printing, 3D printing, and animation.
Nadya Volicer’s Oak and Magnolia series are like eulogies for trees. Created from handmade paper that incorporates charcoal, ink, and petals, the reliefs’ somber tones invoke petrified stumps, stains, and voids. Her paper pulp sculpture Now What more overtly references humans’ presence in the natural world: upon close examination, a brown tree stump topped with white fungus reveals that it is composed of countless tiny human forms.
First impressions also prove somewhat deceptive in the work of Michelle Samour and Carla Fisher Schwartz. Stylistically, Samour’s Adaptation series, drawn in brown ink with a quill pen, references early scientific illustration. But the images take a turn for the surreal, as wires sprout from mushrooms and from the feet of birds. Based on observations of the exterior and interior structures of plants of the Haute Savoie region, the drawings are visual interpretations of how plants and birds are being forced to adapt or are dying due to climate change.
In Undeliverables, Carla Fisher Schwartz displays rock-like sculptures in a grid of white shelves, as one might view specimens in a museum. However, her reference is to something absent: lost landmasses. Furthering the themes of artificiality and fakery, the images that wrap around the polygonal forms are taken from open-source textures depicting natural surfaces such as rock and ice, intended for use in building simulated environments in “sandbox” video games, such as Minecraft.
Yuko Oda’s digital sculpture installation Əvolution also explores the replication of natural forms by synthetic materials. Following an imagined narrative, dew drops made from clear resin lift off the surface of leaves, molting into amorphous forms that transition incrementally into realistic leaf structures. Transformation is explosive in Oda’s Winged Detonations drawings, in which acute pressures on the environment tear apart hummingbirds and send iridescent wings flying.
Explosions notwithstanding, softness and stillness permeate much of the work in Denature. The current culture can feel saturated with apocalyptic narratives about environmental catastrophe and out-of-control technological growth. In contrast, these four artists respond with quiet moments of contemplation. Rock specimens present themselves in orderly rows, trees are memorialized in subtle circles, tiny strokes of ink coalesce into delicate hybrid creatures, and mysterious leaf-like forms rise in a graceful arc. As disorienting as change may be, there is something reassuring about how each artist imposes order in her world.