Alexis Rockman: New Mexico Field Drawings

Sperone Westwater - New York

By Robert Claiborne Morris

Alexis Rockman’s show “New Mexico Field Drawings” at Sperone Westwater is a remarkable artistic, environmental and archeological exploration into the past and future.

It begins with some 75 works on paper arranged on a nearly 25- foot wall of creatures and plant life, some extinct, some endangered and some smugly thriving off of man’s own waste and consumption (Mole Cricket and Abert’s Squirrel to name a couple). Working in the field, with the help of experts, Rockman collected soil, clay and other found materials from which to make his medium. The ghost-like impressions eerily interact, soaring, howling, flapping, posing, leaping and attacking as the eye bounces from image to image. To call these paintings watercolors would not do them justice; rather, they are “water biologicals,” fusing muted earth tones, umbers, sienna, gray and green to capture a kind of natural timelessness and transcendence rarely witnessed in the world of art.

Up from the banks of the Rio Grande, using soil and acrylic polymer on paper, come the endangered Coyote Willow plant and its invasive rival, the Russian Olive, choking out native species and in turn the food chain that feeds from it. Permian Period fossil, discovered in a place Rockman refers to only as “Site 1, off US 84″, is used to conjure up a Stegosaurus and Ophiacodon, a crocodile-looking creature howling at a predator, perhaps the Allosaurus, hanging directly above him and equally poised to tear into someone’s hind side.

I found myself wanting to squint my eyes and peer across the vast wall of images to see it collectively; to take in what has been lost, and, to ask:  Who or what will come after us to record and document our existence and extinction?

Alexis Rockman, New Mexico Field Drawings, 2017, organic material and acrylic polymer on paper, 76 drawings; dimensions variable. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.

Angela Westwater, the incredibly accomplished curator and partial namesake of the gallery, stops by to let me know that this latest series is by no means Rockman’s first foray into the field. In fact, she explains (and suggests a close read of Lucy Lippard’s essay “Eyes Wide Open” in the catalogue for the show) that Rockman first turned to natural elements when he found himself in a Guyana rainforest without a pencil back in 1994! The gallery’s creative director and veteran art journalist, Brian Boucher, further describes not just the artist’s meticulous process for creating the paintings, but that the arrangement of the pieces is dictated by the artist: The interplay between species and plant life is indeed intentional.

In the end, “New Mexico Field Drawings” is very much an orchestral wonder with all pieces, all 76 creatures, plants and trees contributing to a symphonic whole, more theme music to Jurassic Park than Hudson River group influenced.

Three days after the show closed August 3, the New York Times Magazine published an all black cover except for these words in small white type: “Thirty years ago, we could have saved the planet.” It seemed a perfect postscript to the show.

(June 21 - August 3, 2018)

Robert Claiborne Morris is a multi-media artist and arts writer who lives and works on Tybee Island, Ga.

Filed Under: Reviews