Hovering Between Nature and Culture: Exhibition Review by The Provincetown Independent
Coady Brown, Bouquet #15, 2023. Oil on canvas.
Nature isn’t always natural, suggests the Fine Arts Work Center’s summer exhibition, “To Move a Mountain.”
Coady Brown, an artist who curated the work by nine former FAWC fellows, writes in the exhibition statement about flowers as romantic symbols. She includes one of her own flower paintings in the show — a simple bouquet against a background the color of a faded yellow highlighter. The synthetic color and Brown’s stylized brush stokes divorce these flowers from nature. These leaves and flowers belong more to the language of abstraction and painting – the domain of culture.
Of course, many aspects of nature — including flowers, vegetables, parks, and animals — have long been controlled, domesticated, and poeticized by humans. This exhibition highlights that mediation and suggests that when we look at an artwork depicting something from the natural world, we’re not really seeing nature in any pure sense but rather a reflection of our culture.
The exhibition, spread across two rooms in the Hudson D. Walker Gallery, is sparse. Colorful paintings dominate, but there is also sculpture, photography, and drawing. The first room is anchored by two large-scale works, a painting by Dani Levine and a charcoal-and-pastel drawing by Alina Perez. Both works are landscapes, in a sense, but their colors are decidedly synthetic. The landscapes in these paintings are not records of specific places but rather springboards to explore sexuality, kitsch, and abstraction.
— Abraham Storer
To read the complete review in The Provincetown Independent, visit here.
