OTHERWORLDLY DREAMS
NHCC hosts nature-based collage exhibition ‘Fantasia Fantastica’
The National Hispanic Cultural Center is hosting “Fantasia Fantastica,” a beautifully installed nature-based collage exhibition with works by Nick Abdalla, Cynthia Cook, Carlos Quinto Kemm and Rachel Muldez, through May 22.
Abdalla is an evolutionary artist who began with predominantly figurative two-dimensional paintings and drawings that morphed from classical seated and reclining figures into landscapes and earth studies that retained elements from the human figure.
Abdalla incorporated his love of the landscape and discoveries of petroglyphs into notebooks filled with fantastically complex compositions that twisted and folded back into themselves as if existing in a separate dimension.
After Abdalla took a sabbatical visit to Australia, his mind journeys through hundreds of notebook pages grew into full-blown three-dimensional constructions made from a plethora of found materials ranging from discarded rattan bentwood furniture parts, corrugated cardboard, tree roots, paint, cloth, adhesives and other natural and man-made detritus.
His inspiration bank embraced all of art history, from his many years of university teaching, as well as memories of Uluru/Ayres Rock, Australia, and encounters with the art and artifacts of the 40,000-year-old Australian Aboriginal culture.
From Abdalla’s hands, now free of professional academic concerns and self-imposed restraint, fell free-form dancing Shivas, dual compositions like Gemini and scores of other complex and highly expressive objects that no longer needed the mixed blessing support of group critique or the nod from deans and department heads.
For more than 20 years Abdalla has used his studio time to rid himself from the burden of art historical canon to create a playful state of blissful oblivion. Pablo Picasso once said that he learned to paint like Titan when he was a teenager and spent the rest of his life trying to learn how to paint like a child.
Like Picasso, Abdalla seeks his innocence to create from his inner joy and to push big ideas and high thoughts to the wayside as he strolls along the true creative path of pure imagination. His only question is, what happens if I do this?
The results of that question are beautifully complex living objects that may well have secret lives, adventures and conversations behind the closed and darkened doors of the studio or museum. There are Native people in Australia who believe that their lives are dreamed by the whales that frequent the southern shoreline. The challenge is to have interesting adventures to entertain those sleeping whales.
Cook is a hard-charging artist whose penultimate girlhood dream was to show her work in the Mariposa Gallery. Like many childhood fantasies hers wasn’t big enough even though she became a regular at the gallery. As the years went by, Cook’s art became widely shown and remains in private and public collections around the world.
Her work is small in size but exudes a breathtaking monumentality and a long-view sense of time. Scraps of tin are re-formed, repurposed and reconditioned to become settings for seeds, cockroach wings or the iridescent wing of a housefly.
No iota of debris is too insignificant for Cook’s attention resulting in highly detailed constructions that touch upon early found-object art by Claes Oldenburg and, of course, Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes. Even though those connections can be justified, Cook separates herself through her intention to create stand-alone objects many of which can be worn as jewelry.
Cook has a transcendent sensibility
for collage and assemblage that has spiritual underpinnings. In some aspects, she is a latter-day santera who simultaneously reaches back to shamanistic belief systems.
The legendary Carlos Quinto Kemm is a collage artist on steroids who manifests baroque compositions in basrelief that boggle the mind and dazzle the eye. When viewing this exhibition, plan on staying awhile or breaking for lunch, because each one of Kemm’s works deserve a very long perusal. This is true of all four artists, so plan for a long visit or a series of visits.
In “An Artist’s Life,” Kemm bundles and emblemizes the passage of time, with the roiling sea of creation, the assault of aging but relevant masterworks and the contemplative necessity of self-reflection and regeneration. The seemingly safe haven of a small ship finds itself too close to the rocks for salvation while death rides the masthead.
For Kemm, a single artist’s life embodies the creative and destructive power of the entire universe just as a dust mote, grain of sand or drop of midnight dew contains and mirrors the occult history of the cosmos.
Muldez bridges past and present states of human consciousness with stone spirals, bits of tree bark, pine cones and leaves. Like Abdalla, Cook and Kemm, she pays homage to the as above, so below Tao of nature. Her stone circles and spirals are connected to contemporary minimalism as well as very ancient tribal cosmologies that manifested echoes of the spiral Milky Way in their own monolithic and megalithic arrangements.
Hats off to curator Jadira Gurule, who assembled this stunning exhibition of four talented artists in one of the finest venues in the Southwest. Don’t limit yourself to one visit.