“A Tangled Existence”
Nicole Irene Anderson
Johansson Projects
2300 Telegraph Ave, Oakland
November 1, 2024- Jan 31, 2025
Art Murmur Reception January 3, 2025
A burst of lightning shatters its large amethyst and royal purple backdrop, dispersing, reforming as small flower stalks, gasping their last breaths of life. The sedum-like stems, floodlit, as if by headlights in a swamp of roiling electricity, glare green and orange, the sky a pulsing white map of connective power, a red cabbage sliced in two, its face illuminated in the night.
“Source of Power,” by Nicole Irene Anderson, hangs visible through the first of several seductively smooth white doorway-keyhole cutouts that frame the artworks and charmingly divide gallery space into smaller “rooms” at Johansson Projects on Telegraph Avenue. The remainder of the works in the show, “A Tangled Existence,” are of landscapes true and constructed, with the destruction of invasive species, our human selves very much included, on full display. The “plausible realities,” collaged in paint and etched in metalpoint, sketched in graphite and charcoal, are “charged with feeling and moral complexity,” and offer a gentle but forceful look into the devastation we’ve wrought across the American West.
Though varied in size and scope, color and content and complexity, many of the works share a sense of warp, a flattening of time and space. Perspectives twist, distances collapse, and improbable layers appear. The eerily beautiful violence of a takeover echo throughout, the inevitable wildness of death to come.
Anderson’s small, monochromatic metalpoint pieces, (a mere 10 x 16 inches in contrast to the mammoth 55 x 77 canvases of the eucalypts,) such as “Solitude,” “Strange Ideas,” and “Invisible Forces”, hung in stark contrast to their larger, brighter counterparts. Printed on pigment-tinted chalk ground on panel, these delicate etchings melted into themselves, the simply shaded buildings and straight lines of human touch in “Strange Ideas” and “Solitude” appearing unfinished next to their surroundings. Each wood burl and valley lovingly rendered, the pale flat surfaces of roof, tower, barn, phone post half-completed, afterthoughts.
“Instruments of Life” and “Monsters”
The pieces most noticeably lacking a human element held me most, particularly “Monsters,” depicting two shedding, seemingly bleeding rainbow eucalyptus trees. Shown front and center upon entrance, it outshined many of the surrounding pieces. Its black and white cousin, “Instruments of Life,” also depicting the shaggy streaking tears of peeling trees, served high-end in-home-custom-mural, with hints of process and the imperfections of human touch still peeking through. It also, I discovered upon examining my photos later, serves half a man’s face playing the flute a la op-art, so that’s fun, presumably its namesake, and potentially destructive, too.
Real or imagined, the invasives in and around us do require further examination. Anderson’s works offer a chance to breathe in the clean air of spaces perhaps healing from destructive forces, or maybe the experiencing the spread of humanity’s rot, all imbued with rich color and served in a bright and airy setting.
