Rae Johnson: Forgotten Soul

by Roy Bernardi and Jennifer Leskiw

Recently, we went to see the exhibition of Rae Johnson’s work at the Christopher Cutts Gallery on Morrow Avenue in downtown Toronto. Several large-scale landscape paintings were shown among smaller more intimate landscapes. Johnson, born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, studied at the New School of Art in Toronto from 1975 to 1976 and continued her education at the Ontario College of Art from 1977 to 1980. As a distinguished female Canadian artist, she lived and created art in Toronto during the 1980s before relocating to Flesherton, Ontario, in 1987. She stated that Robert Markle, one of her educators, was her most significant influence. She passed away in 2020. The opening event was attended by Rae Johnson’s children, Adrian, Joslyn and June.

Rae Johnson, Sunset, Lake Winnipeg, 1988, oil on wood, 244 x 366 cm
Rae Johnson, Sunset, Lake Winnipeg, 1988, oil on wood, 244 x 366 cm

Her artistic expression captures the diverse experiences of life in her immediate surroundings. Her artwork ranges from representations of demons and ethereal beings in the snow, to angelic figures, scenes of indulgence, intimate moments in bathtubs, depictions of societal outcasts, inebriated individuals, saintly figures, and verdant landscapes reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. Her creations explore the intersection of the sacred and the profane. She often portrayed her studio or living space, utilizing friends and her children as subjects.

Joslyn Rogers in front of Rae Johnson's oil painting Janet's Living Room 1998, Acrylic on canvas.
Joslyn Rogers in front of Rae Johnson’s oil painting Janet’s Living Room, 1998, oil on wood.

We sat down with her daughter Joslyn Rogers who works in the entertainment industry as an Actor/Writer/Director for a candid interview.

What was life like as the child of an artist?

I was raised in a creative environment.  I had the privilege of being the child of two talented individuals.  My mother Rae Johnson was a gifted visual artist. My father, Clarke Rogers, was the artistic director from 1982-1987 of Theatre Passe Muraille, a Canadian alternative theatre company that champions independent and experimental performances.  

I remember playing in my mother’s various studios. She would be painting into the night, listening to Nirvana or Jimi Hendrix, and I would be finger painting beside her. I remember falling asleep to the clickety-clack of my father’s typewriter, and playing backstage at his rehearsals. When I was a baby we were in-between apartments so we slept on the set of ‘Jessica’, a play by Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell. My father was directing the play and my mother painted the poster for it. 

Rae Johnson, Night Games at Paradise, 1984, Oil on canvas, 213.4 x 335.3 cm
Rae Johnson, Night Games at Paradise, 1984, oil on canvas, 213.4 x 335.3 cm

We moved out of Toronto in the late 1980s and bought a country property in Flesherton, Ontario. We had acres of forest around us and a pond which became the muse for mother’s paintings over the next decade. Flesherton was an artist community so most of my friends were children of artists, like the daughters of painter Harold Klunder and sculptor performance artist Catherine Carmichael. Regardless of where we lived, our living rooms always transformed into my mother’s creative workspace. We frequently attended art shows alongside her eclectic circle of friends, including her close companions and fellow artists Tom Dean, Sybil Goldstein and Lorne Wagman. 

My sister, brother, and I were often left to our own devices, and would play from morning until night out in the sprawling woods surrounding our house. We became very attuned to nature, to the spirits of the forest, and were given the freedom to explore the imaginary worlds we would create in play.

Rae Johnson, Unknown Title (Rae's bedroom and studio in Flesherton), 1995, Oil on wood panel, 121.9 x 182.9 cm
Rae Johnson, Unknown Title (Rae’s bedroom and studio in Flesherton), 1995, oil on wood panel, 121.9 x 182.9 cm

After the death of my father, my family moved back to Toronto. It’s only now as an adult that I can truly appreciate the clan I grew up with and belong to, and that when I declared to my mother as a little girl that I wanted to be an actress, I was met with encouragement and not “get a real job”.

My mother, Rae, was an integral part of the Toronto arts community during the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this time, a collective emerged, ChromaZone, a vibrant creative group dedicated to reintroducing figurative painting to Toronto, featuring notable figures such as Brian Burnett, Oliver Girling, Andy Fabo, Sybil Goldstein and Tony Wilson. My mother was also an associate professor at OCADU. It’s stunning how influential she was.  

Tell us what you know about your mother’s relationship with Brian Burnett? 

Brian and my mother met at The New School of Art in Toronto as students. They quickly fell in love and had my brother Adrian. My mother told me about being poor students with a babe in arms, living in artist warehouses, and the “art wars” between them – spending nights trying to out-paint one another. Tom Dean remembers visiting Rae and Brian at their illegal apartment on Niagara street, which they had converted mostly into their studio with floor to ceiling paintings and a giant mound of dirty baby diapers in the centre of it all. Brian and Rae were budding artists together. They played in experimental art bands, one called Niagara, and another called DogSound, with other local Queen West visual artists like Micheal Merrill, Alan Glicksman, Lorne Wagman, and Derek Caines. They were ambitious, hot young art stars, and found their artistic voices together. They had the best art dealers in town: Brian was with Av Issacs, and Rae with Carmen Lamanna. I can see how they influenced each other in their respective paintings which share surrealist, dream-like qualities. Sometimes I can even see representations of each other in their work.

Rae Johnson, Winter Angel, 2018, Oil and graphite on canvas, 139.7 x 129.5 cm
Rae Johnson, Winter Angel, 2018, oil and graphite on canvas, 139.7 x 129.5 cm

They broke up in the mid 80s after nearly a decade together. It was devastating to my mother, who nearly had a mental breakdown but, that led to some of her most powerful paintings which now belong to permanent collections throughout Canada.

What do you recall about Rae’s art work?

When I think of my mother’s work, I recall my own life. When we were living in Florence, she was working on a series titled “Bambino Miracolo”, which was exhibited at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Rome, Italy. They were large scale oil paintings inspired by the horrific images coming out of the Bosnian war at the time. Embedded in the painted scenes were dying babies attached to intrusive medical devices and renaissance angels guarding over top. 

My life has been chronicled through my mother’s paintings. She painted our property in Flesherton, every season, every time of day. She painted portraits of her friends, every studio she inhabited, the storms and sunsets over Lake Winnipeg where our family cottage was, and she painted us, her children. I appear in her paintings at every stage of my life: as a baby, a young girl, and even as an adult. One of the most inspiring qualities about my mother was that she always painted. My father committed suicide by hanging in our Flesherton forest in 1996. From that came a body of work she called “The Black and White Series” and “The Premonition Drawings”. Like the titles suggest, they are black and white, often interiors of her bedroom with ghostly figures lurking in the shadows.

Did Rae favour figurative work over landscape painting?

My mother didn’t start painting landscapes until the late 1980’s after moving to Flesherton. She said she began in secret, afraid the new subject matter would be perceived as an affront to her well established style of “urban nightmares.” To her, this transition to painting nature was her most daring work. She also proclaimed that painting the sunsets over our Flesherton Pond was where she learned how to paint light. My mother’s paintings have a narrative spirit, and she would alternate between figurative and landscape for the rest of her life, each reflecting her inner soul. 

Rae Johnson, The Opponent 1982, Acrylic on Canvas, 167.6 x 203.2 cm
Rae Johnson, The Opponent, 1982, acrylic on canvas, 167.6 x 203.2 cm

I believe that good artists are visionaries, often unacknowledged or misunderstood in their own time. After taking on her artistic estate, I have been working alongside the new generation of curators and artists. They seem to understand and appreciate my mother’s work and that of her contemporaries. My mother was ahead of her time, waiting to be rediscovered. 

Three Short Takes on Exhibitions in New York

by John Mendelsohn

Jen Mazza: Vicissitudes of Nature
January 10-February 22, 2025
Ulterior Gallery, New York
www.ulteriorgallery.com

Christopher Hart Chambers: Passages
January 23-March 11, 2025
Crossing Art, New York
www.crossingart.com

Louisa Waber: The World Inside This One
January 21- March 7, 2025
TenBerke Architects
events@tenberke.com

In her exhibition, Jen Mazza has assembled a kind of rebus made of quotations, both visual and literary. “Rebus” implies that from the images and words – variously painted, written, and sculpted – something will be spelled out. Maybe the desire to make sense is the red herring in this mystery, but nonetheless clues abound.

The original sources for the works are all from the past, starting in the Renaissance, on up to the early 20th century. This range of time periods lends an archival, antiquarian air to the exhibition. But rather than creating a cabinet of curiosities, Mazza’s poetic conceptualism works like poetry itself, placing one image adjacent to the next, and allowing their energetic conjunction to conjure something new in our consciousness.

Jen Mazza, Portent 1, 2024, oil on canvas, 67 x 87 x 2 in. (170.2 x 221 x 5.1 cm) 
Photo by Jason Mandella, Courtesy of Ulterior Gallery and Jen Mazza (c)Jen Mazza 
Jen MazzaPortent 1, 2024, oil on canvas, 67 x 87 x 2 in. (170.2 x 221 x 5.1 cm) 
Photo by Jason Mandella, Courtesy of Ulterior Gallery and Jen Mazza (c)Jen Mazza 

In a 2021 interview, Mazza said that, “After all, anytime that we engage an historical work, we are engaging with the past as if it pertains to us.” So, we as viewers must be alert to how these couriers from an earlier time might actually be speaking to us about our relationship to the natural world, history, and most importantly to change as an existential constant.

The exhibition’s title, Vicissitudes of Nature, points to life’s unpredictable contingencies. This sense is embodied in the artist’s rendering of Ruskin’s diary script, his words describing the weather, including “Terrific Thunder”, “brighter”, “beauty”, and “Worse and worse”.

Water and its evocative possibilities are a recurring presence throughout the exhibition – in an expanse of sea, in diagrams of nautical navigation, in the name of a ship, and in passages from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves.

This feeling of watery, shifting fortunes is embodied in the exhibition’s largest work, Portent 1, a painted excerpt of Titian’s The Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, a 12-block woodcut. In Mazza’s version the Israelites and the Egyptians have both been effaced, with only the rippling waves remaining visible.

Jen Mazza, Terpsichore (1760), 2022, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 in. (101.6 x 152.4 cm) 
Photo by Jason Mandella, Courtesy of Ulterior Gallery and Jen Mazza (c)Jen Mazza
Jen MazzaTerpsichore (1760), 2022, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 in. (101.6 x 152.4 cm) 
Photo by Jason Mandella, Courtesy of Ulterior Gallery and Jen Mazza (c)Jen Mazza

The sailing ship HMS Terpsichore delivered from Southern Africa the first zebra publicly displayed in Great Britain, the sole survivor of a pair that had been transported. In Terpsichore (1760) Mazza faithfully reproduces George Stubbs’s painting of the animal, while in Terpsichore (1847), the painting’s subject is a white silhouette – both are reminders of the empire’s colonial exploitation.

Christopher Hart Chambers paints paradise in the form of flowers, leaves, and branches, densely layered in atmospheric space. He evokes a world in bold motifs, distillations of growing things blooming and intertwining.

This world of organic energy is both observed from real life, and echoes how in many cultures nature becomes art, bringing the life of plants into human discourse as a charged spiritual, aesthetic, or decorative presence. In Chambers’s work we sense as a model flowers and branches depicted in the art of China and Japan. Equally apparent is the lineage of modern painting, ranging from Matisse to Alex Katz, that seeks to create simplified abstractions of nature’s complexity. In Chambers’s hands, the patterns of nature take on logo-like silhouettes, perhaps a distant recollection of this painter’s early days in the Street Art movement in New York.

Christopher Hart Chambers, Fertile Circus, 2024, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 in., Photo credit: Shayomi Srivastava
Christopher Hart ChambersFertile Circus, 2024, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 in., Photo credit: Shayomi Srivastava

One striking work is Fertile Circus, a fugue of overlapping rhythms, formed by glowing depths of yellow light, that alternate with vertical passages of olive green and aqua. Overlaying this background are black tree trunks sprouting semi-transparent scarlet flowers. Wafting in front of the trees are wavering bands of turquoise and lavender. Closest to us are vertical sine curves in a soft green, and a large central stem with leaves that seems to create a negative space for us to enter.

Christopher Hart Chambers, Chocolate Forest, 2024, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 in., Photo credit: Shayomi Srivastava
Christopher Hart ChambersChocolate Forest, 2024, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 in., Photo credit: Shayomi Srivastava

In the painting Chocolate Forest, black, spear-like leaves ominously dominate the soft-focus space beyond, over which play a sign of hope – twisting stems and small, red flowers.

The artist’s touch is ever-present in these works, in the delicate mists of colored space, and in the impasto, scumbling, and glazes of oil paint. These painterly techniques work in contrast to the flat, solidly colored trees and tendrils.

Color is the prime vehicle for feeling in these works. It exists on a spectrum from jewel-like tones, to color tamed with the admixture of white, to black that serves as a stark counterpoint.

Taken together, the elements of Chambers’s paintings coalesce into an enchanted vision, a psychedelic realm that encompasses dualities – the nuanced and the graphic, the buoyant and the haunted.

The World Inside This One, written across one of Louisa Waber’s pieces from 2023, serves as the title of this exhibition. These words might be guide to entering into the many small works on paper and the paintings shown here. Through drawing, watercolor, and acrylic, Waber evokes a psychic realm to which the visual is an opened portal.

Louisa Waber, Untitled, 2024, watercolor on Arches archival watercolor paper, 10 x 7" (plus frame) Photo by Louisa Waber
Louisa Waber, Untitled, 2024, watercolor on Arches archival watercolor paper, 10 x 7″ (plus frame) Photo by Louisa Waber

This portal takes many forms, but certain commonalities emerge. A small sheet of paper’s surface flooded with a wash of color, as a spidery structure floats across it. A bold form emerging from a dark atmosphere, along with a tracery of lines. A quilt-like grid holding a grid of color and emptiness. Vivid brushstrokes supporting a bramble of angled lines.

These are just a few of the recurring motifs, but together they constitute an ongoing, seemingly diaristic series of documents that record states of feeling. Like visual seismographs, they are sensitive to the fluctuations of mediums under the artist’s touch. They variously convey a sense anguish, searching, release, and fierce energy, along with a desire to construct a matrix to hold all the emotions that have been awakened. It seems that above all there is an insistence on the artist’s voice to speak, whether emphatically or quietly, without censorship.

Louisa Waber, How Do You Know?, 2024, acrylic, marker, and ink on canvas, 20 x 16" Photo by Louisa Waber
Louisa Waber, How Do You Know?, 2024, acrylic, marker, and ink on canvas, 20 x 16″ Photo by Louisa Waber

A prime example is the painting How Do You Know? from 2024, with its spare, cobalt blue brushstroke that curves back on itself, like the vestige of a whirlwind. On top of it are drawn blood-red lines, a jury-rigged, high-wire act above the maelstrom.

This work is part of a heritage that has many strands. There is the history of Expressionism, in its many forms, with its faith in painterly physicality. The example of Paul Klee is a recurring one, with his intimate evocations of the dream-world that is just beyond the everyday. And there are other precedents, like Louise Fishman, who especially in her early work combined outspoken feminism and abstraction.

In the end, what makes these paintings and drawings original is how this particular artist grants us access, through a kind of direct transmission, to the drenched landscape of her inner world.

The Impact of John Scott in Canadian Art

by Roy Bernardi

John Scott, 2021, being interviewed at the Weekly on the Arts program
John Scott, 2021, being interviewed at the Weekly on the Arts program

John Scott was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, in 1950 and died at the age of 72 in 2022. He was raised in the Cold War era that concerned itself with the imminent threat of nuclear conflict.

A Canadian multimedia artist, Scott, was known for his drawings, paintings and sculpture/installations. His artistic creations have drawn comparisons to those of American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), who similarly explored themes of mortality, destruction, and the disparity between wealth and poverty. In the wake of Basquiat’s passing and his rise to fame, Scott has been dubbed the “Basquiat of Canada.” It is important to note that Scott, being ten years Basquiat’s senior, had already established his artistic identity well before Basquiat’s initial creations.

Renowned for his compulsive mark-making and ironic wit, Scott was a visionary in the art world. He was a long-standing professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University, challenging and inspiring his students to develop their individual creative styles and express their innermost thoughts and emotions through their art. Scott was an influential artist within the Toronto art community from the early 1980 until his death through his iconic, political and accessible work. 

John Scott, “No Freedom” 1995 mixed media on paper mounted to foam-core, 58 x 73 1/2 inches
John Scott, No Freedom, 1995, mixed media on paper mounted to foam-core, 58 x 73 1/2 inches

Scott’s paintings and sculptures addressed themes of war, industrialization, authority, social class, and fear. For example, he portrayed fighter planes hovering over a blackened earth, cities detached and cast adrift in space, and strange genetic modifications of life. He depicted scenes of political devastation through representations of “twisters” with evil faces, drones, endless tanks whose purpose is surveillance. His many humanlike figures have large bunny-like ears which portray their vulnerability and sensitivity to larger forces.

John Scott, Left; Regina (Queen), 2007/2021, Mixed media on paper mounted on canvas 50 x 38 inches. Right; One Shot World, 2007/2021,Mixed media on paper mounted on canvas 50 x 38 inches
John Scott, Left; Regina (Queen), 2007/2021, Mixed media on paper mounted on canvas 50 x 38 inches. Right; One Shot World, 2007/2021,Mixed media on paper mounted on canvas 50 x 38 inches

Scott lived in a large messy studio in the urban core. He regarded people that he encountered with kindness and generosity, whether they were homeless or affluent, students or scholars. He lived out his belief that art should be accessible by gifting everyone who came into his space with a personalized drawing, and his artwork is ubiquitous in the homes of the many people who knew him. His work was also accessible in another way: while the subject matter may be complex, and the readings layered, regardless of their knowledge of art, the audience easily “got” his work. Nowhere is this accessibility better evidenced than in his work, owned by the National Gallery of Canada, titled “Apocalypse Trans-Am.” This installation of a 1981 Trans-Am car covered in black paint with the Book of Revelations scratched into the surface was lauded as one of the most popular works in the gallery’s collection.

John Scott, Trans Am Apocaylpse” 2016, mixed media on paper 32 x 50 inches
John Scott, Trans Am Apocaylpse, 2016, mixed media on paper 32 x 50 inches

Historically, Scott successfully positioned himself as a prominent artist within the art community, as evidenced by his inclusion in art history texts, museum retrospectives, and various collections and exhibitions. He became the first recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2000. 

Scott’s oeuvre is characterized by a range of pivotal themes, such as “100 Workers, Carnivore, Teddy-Bear, The Bunny-man, The Dark Commander, Trans-am Apocalypse, Jet Fighters, Watch Towers, Tanks, and culminating in the “Night Sky” imagery, which he produced subconsciously, aware that his time was drawing to a close.

John Scott, Left; Dark Commander - Nelson’s Democracy, 2012, Mixed media on paper mounted on canvas 50 x 38 inches. Right; Snake Watch Tower, 2020, Mixed media on paper mounted on canvas 50 x 38 inches
John Scott, Left; Dark Commander – Nelson’s Democracy, 2012, Mixed media on paper mounted on canvas 50 x 38 inches. Right; Snake Watch Tower, 2020, Mixed media on paper mounted on canvas 50 x 38 inches

“Fallen Angel, “words written on paper by Scott featured in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection’s exhibition Fire Storm, serves as a profound reflection of John Scott’s personal interpretation of his existence within the world. This exhibition presents a diverse array of his works, spanning from his early career to 2015. Among the highlights are a small plastic maquette for “Trans-Am Apocalypse,” created in 1987, which includes incised text, and “The Conqueror Worm,” a sculpture from 1997 constructed from sheet metal, rubber tires, electronic components, paint, and a metal frame. Currently Scott’s work can be viewed at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection; John Scott: Fire Storm exhibition from December 7, 2024 to May 11, 2025.

John Scott, Left; Rebel Without a Cause (James Dean), 2000, Charcoal and oil stick on paper 38 x 25 inches. Right; The Transparent Burden, mixed media on paper 50 x 38 inches
John Scott, left; Rebel Without a Cause (James Dean), 2000, Charcoal and oil stick on paper 38 x 25 inches. Right; The Transparent Burden, mixed media on paper 50 x 38 inches

John Scott works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as well as every major museum throughout Canada from the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, The Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, to the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia.

John Scott, Night Sky, 2022, mixed media on paper mounted to canvas 38 x 50 inches (one of the last works to be created by John Scott)
John Scott, Night Sky, 2022, mixed media on paper mounted to canvas, 38 x 50 inches (one of the last works to be created by John Scott)  

Ran Hwang: Evanescence and Regeneration

by: Thalia Vrachopoulos

Ran Hwang’s latest exhibition at the uptown Leila Heller Gallery re-introduces an abundance of transient forms and the eternal ephemeral. Hwang’s oeuvre – many of her artworks are located in such prestigious collections as, the Brooklyn Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and Seoul’s National Museum of Contemporary Art– is inspired by her ever-changing life between the US and Korea, as well as her life-long practise of Seon Buddhism. Hwang’s two-dimensional sculptural pieces are embedded with a delicate sense of ethereal melancholy as if mourning for the end of a life lived and for the pain imbuing the one to come.

Ran Hwang, Evanescense and Regeneration, Becoming Again_ETBF, 2024, paper buttons, pins, beads on Plexiglass, 94.4 x 141.7 inches (6p)
Ran Hwang, Evanescense and Regeneration, Becoming Again_ETBF, 2024, paper buttons, pins, beads on Plexiglass, 94.4 x 141.7 inches (6p)

Hwang’s new artworks created site-specifically for the Evanescence and Regeneration exhibition at Leila Heller Gallery– represent yet another step into an abstract vocabulary in radiant images of impermanent evanescent blooming forms. As seen in her series titled Becoming Again, in which branches of yellowish, rose and white plum blossoms flourish in snake-like constellations against a deep-blue sky, tangled together with cobweb-like boughs – all recurring symbols for the incessant ephemeral and fragility of life and nature – Hwang, carefully perfects with eloquent mastery, the unique embodiment of her well-known iconography into a static background of transparent Plexiglas.                                      

Ran Hwang, Evanescense and Regeneration Healing oblivious aqua_OS, 2024,
buttons, Hanji paper, beads, pins on wooden panels, 78.7 x 141.7 inches
Ran Hwang, Evanescense and Regeneration Healing oblivious aqua_OS, 2024,
buttons, Hanji paper, beads, pins on wooden panels, 78.7 x 141.7 inches

Similarly, in her maximalist work titled Healing Oblivious Aqua_OS, Hwang reformulates the silver-coloured wooden panel – in which her overflowing floret clusters, organically spring – into an immense two-dimensional ellipsoid shape, symbolizing the imminent transitory of natural forms. At the same time through her expression, she comments on the constant eternal cosmic regeneration of the Earth’s biosphere, despite the fleeting nature of phenomenal life. Her delicate blossoms with their colorful petals, appear to flow into a liquid phantasmagoria of becoming. Hwang’s Hanji paper and button-made florets appear to effortlessly meander through the dark branches into blooming bracelets of iridescent stars against the silver firmament.          

But Hwang’s artistic ingenuity stands out in her two small tondos, aptly titled Beyond Serenity. Poetically transforming with a totally new approach, a similar concept as her work Ode to the Full Moon, in which, the bright moon disc appears in fiery colors, beautifully interwoven with blossoms. The lunar disk is traditionally a beloved motif of earthly ephemerality and waning change in Korean art. However, in Beyond Serenity, Hwang reverses its customary meaning revealing like a Zen poem, the hidden and metaphysical connectivity beneath all of life’s phenomena and their apparent change through a conceptual paradox. The spherical geometrical shape of the full-moon now becomes a mystical symbol, not as symbol of constant impermanence, but of a fixed serenity; a static tranquility, into which all worldly change is melded into an abstract oneness, despite the ever-changing becoming of life and nature. In this way, the two monochromatic pieces delve into the transcendent realms of non-objectivity. The individual floral figures, which once engulfed the moon’s surface have dissolved now into a primordial womb, into a regenerating eternal One, in which fading and becoming has totally ceased. Something, that is reinforced by their crushing red or pink monochrome.

Hwang’s thematic choice of terrestrial transience comes to grips with the current exhibition of the Japanese artist Kenta Anzai, titled Impermanence at New York’s Guild Gallery. Although both artists address themes of ephemerality, their artistic methods diverge significantly. Anzai’s abstract yet dispiriting objects –a silent plethora of black vessels, primarily made of earthenware and urushi-tree lacquer, like the aesthetic tradition of wabi-sabi – constitute a material embodiment of the brief beauty of nature, adhering thus to a minimalist abstract approach of emptiness. His hollow pottery of organic shapes reflects though raw simplicity, and monochrome materiality, feelings of corrosion, exploiting vacancy or emptiness as artistic elements to formally render the fleeting experience of time’s endless passage.

Ran Hwang, Evanescence and Regeneration opening
Ran Hwang, Evanescence and Regeneration opening

In contrast, Hwang’s installations tackle the metaphysical problem of impermanence, not only through ascetic minimalism but via an electrifying maximalism of regenerating form and vivacious colors. Flowers, cobwebs, branches and falling stars symbolize eternal change. Nature constantly regenerates new ephemeral forms that live until their eventual passing, repeating thus a never-ending cycle of generation, degeneration, regeneration. Firmly standing on middle ground between sensuous representation and Anzai’s negating abstraction, Hwang blithely confronts the irreversible flowing of time, not with an abstract rendering of the void, but with a poetic iconography of rejuvenating nature.

Ran Hwang, Evanescence and Regeneration opening
Ran Hwang, Evanescence and Regeneration opening

The Evanescence and Regeneration exhibition offers a riveting encounter with the experience of transience and rebirth. Hwang creates a material and spiritual dialectic, through her ethereal works in unconventional media, highlighting the beauty of fragility and the circularity of time. Her monumental floral imagery stabilizes a fugitive glimpse of incessant flux and temporality into biomorphic figures. But simultaneously, it transforms the vast openness of infinity into the frailest of phenomena, merely a blossom’s petal. In a way, Hwang successfully undertakes to poetically inject the eternal now of Pascal, into the brief temporality of the moment.

On Nicky Enright’s FLAGments, FRACKments, and I’M MIGRATION

by Matthew Garrison

Bronx based artist Nicky Enright, born in Ecuador, disrupts and collapses events and observations at Albright College’s Freedman Gallery in two monumental drawing series, FLAGments and FRACKments. In these works, images extracted from Enright’s own photographs and past projects are distilled into immense black and white compositions. In tandem with the drawings, Enright’s video, I’M MIGRATION, presents manipulated closed-circuit and aerial footage of individuals traversing parched landscapes behind boldfaced captions. Together, the work imparts an urgent need to address our international climate crisis as global citizens in a world where diminishing resources and violent weather events are driving people from their homes in search of safety and a living wage.

Nicky Enright, FRACKments 01: Scape (5 ½ x 20 feet)
Nicky Enright, FRACKments 01: Scape, 5 ½ x 20 feet. Photo: John Pankratz

The largest of Enright’s drawings from the FRACKments series, FRACKments 01: Scape(5 ½ x 20 feet) consists of a cumulation of multiple sheets of paper arranged side-by-side on the wall. Urgency is evident in the rapid application of ink and wax pencil. The materials preclude erasure. Consequently, improvised images and bold passages of light and dark emerge from its execution. Enright’s early days as a graffiti artist seem to inform the energy and necessity of Scape’s realization. The drawing is a dense description of catastrophe, mutation and layered associations. Its constellation of colliding themes forecasts a perilous future. An enormous cracked skull on the left side of the drawing is counterbalanced on the right by an even larger portrait of an unwitting pigeon or parrot. The pigeon/parrot’s massive size might be the result of an extreme close-up or, perhaps, giant birds inhabit Enright’s unruly world. As the pigeon/parrot gazes outward from the drawing, two young figures are intent on a receipt, as if analyzing a list of challenges encountered in the chaotic world they’ve inherited. Elsewhere in the composition, scuba divers float above a bleak topography containing a small flag and large industrial crane. The arm of the crane intersects a billowing smokestack attached to the back of a turtle. Scape shows the planet on a precipice, where extreme evolution is necessary if habitats and species are to survive.

Nicky Enright, FRACKments 01: Scape, 2023. Detail photo: Matthew Garrison
Nicky Enright, FRACKments 01: Scape, 2023. Detail photo: Matthew Garrison

Enright’s drawings belong to a lineage of large-scale work that layers imagery and highlights significant world events. The most recognized is Picasso’s black and white response to the 1937 Nazi bombing of the small Basque town, Guernica. Picasso’s grayscale palette is often compared to newsprint, the prevalent mass media of his time, but the painting’s exclusion of color also distills the shear horror of the attack. Hovering over Guernica’s destruction is a jagged lightbulb, emblematic of the detached technology that separates violent actions from tragic consequences. Similarly located in Enright’s drawing, Scape, is a tree on its side, cleanly sliced through with a saw, its interior rings floating above a tempestuous world, indexing the passage of time and loss.

Life and resources are precious in FLAGments and FRACKments. For instance, in Enright’s piece, FRACKments 07: Trash, the remnants of life are commemorated with white lines against a dark void, while the drawing, FRACKments 02: Cementerio Mundial, simultaneously evokes a “world cemetery” and the funeral of his uncle, Tío Miguel, who died in Ecuador in March 2024. Time itself is expansive in the work, reaching far beyond the present, encompassing past and future generations. Children are interspersed throughout the two series. Enright’s young son, currently living in Switzerland, peers out of the drawing, FLAGments 05: Gazebo, and plays a game of life-size chess in FLAGments 06: Stars. In Enright’s drawing, FLAGments 03: Customs (5 ½ x 10 feet), his son holds a blank sign. Text appears throughout many of the drawings as handwritten correspondence, brand names and graffiti, although it is occasionally absent in areas where words are expected. In addition to the empty sign, Stumbling Stones are incorporated into Customs. Enright encountered these small brass stones during a residency in Berlin. Stumbling Stones (Stolpersteine in German) is a vast memorial conceived by artist Gunter Demnig in 1992. Each stone, inscribed with the name of a Holocaust victim, is laid in front of the victim’s last known private residence throughout Europe and Russia. The absence of names on the stones in Enright’s work allows for personal reflection.

Enright’s art also aligns with artists whose work investigates the movement of people. For example, Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden addressed The Great Migration in paintings and collage. And, Mexican muralist, José Clemente Orozco, recounted the migration of indigenous American civilization thousands of years ago in the 1934 fresco, Migration, a part of his immersive mural, The Epic of American Civilization. However, Enright acknowledges modern modes of transportation and surveillance in his exploration of borders and migration. His video, I’M MIGRATION, consists largely of drone footage, while airplanes and vehicles are incorporated into his drawings. Consequently, border crossings come to encompass, not only checkpoints, but also the broader implications of flying, airport customs and transportation security. Enright’s drawing, FLAGments 05: Gazebo, deconstructs air travel and flags through vertical and horizontal bands that read as an amalgamation of national symbols. The drawing includes both interior and exterior views of an airplane. A capsule shaped porthole in the upper right corner looks out onto the aircraft’s wing through what might be seen as household blinds. A plane soars off the left edge of the drawing. This could be a rendering of the same plane observed simultaneously from interior and exterior perspectives or, perhaps, it is a representation of the arrival and departure of respective aircraft. A gazebo dominates the center of the drawing, described by Enright as a meeting place. Yet, the gazebo is empty, allowing for personal projections of community within its structure, or inferring an evacuation. Hovering above the gazebo is a bird’s-eye view of a young figure encircled within a void, silently observing the ebb and flow of events.

Nicky Enright, FLAGments 05: Gazebo, 42 x 22 inches, photo: John Pankratz
Nicky Enright, FLAGments 05: Gazebo, 42 x 22 inches. Photo: John Pankratz

Enright’s installation of FLAGments and FRACKments in conjunction with I’M MIGRATION directly connects migration to nationalism and global warming. Also contributing to border tensions are populations seeking a living wage. In Enright’s piece, FLAGments 08: Zero, a hand holds a bill adjusted to show its value in U.S. dollars (.000024). He explains that the design for Zero was based on the least valuable currency in the world at the time of its realization, the Iranian Rial. In response to this severe economic discrepancy, Enright advocates for a global minimum wage and has designed The Globo, a universal currency that incorporates legal tender from more than twenty-five countries. He also questions the very concept of borders established through dominance and warfare, which often contradict nature’s own configuration of rivers, coasts, and mountain ranges. Once again, Enright’s stance recalls Orozco’s mural, The Epic of American Civilization. In Orozco’s panel, Modern Migration of the Spirit, a heap of religious artifacts lay at the base of a mountain comprised of heavy artillery. Here, spirituality is distorted to align with the values that justify brutality and barbarism in the shaping of civilizations. Christ himself, the Prince of Peace, is presented as an ax wielding warrior with his fist raised. A natural landscape has been recreated in the image of its conquerors.

Nicky Enright, FLAGments 01: Welcome-Back, 42 x 22 inches. Photo: Paige Critcher
Nicky Enright, FLAGments 01: Welcome-Back, 42 x 22 inches. Photo: Paige Critcher 

Enright’s expansive conception of time across generations necessitates a drastic and immediate response to the realities of climate change. Economies reliant on extracting value from precious resources and populations must recalibrate to emphasize restoration and repair and, in the process, acknowledge that migration is inevitable and beneficial to a healthy society. In Enright’s drawing, FLAGments 01: Welcome Back, people are held captive behind a fence. They are looking in different directions, and some appear to be lost in reflection. Their detachment from one another implies sustained conditions that are unchanging, as though condemned to a perpetual state of waiting. The irony of the drawing’s title inscribed on the fence calls into question their location. Have they returned home, or are they confined elsewhere? Will they be released or forcibly transferred? The humanity of the detainees is in stark contrast to their captivity. These conditions, so frequently viewed in the media, are often met with indifference, apathy and jingoist threats. An uncertain future permeates Enright’s work. FLAGments and FRACKments encompasses a planet on the brink of ruin with inhabitants who must uproot to survive a fragmented world of borders, ideologies and governments that would prioritize nationalism over humanity.

Artist, László Moholy-Nagy, observed in his seminal text, Vision in Motion, “From the time of the first flags and emblems, creating the romance of heraldry, the customs of religion, peoples and nations have been given meaning by hues of the spectrum.” The chromatic identifiers described by Moholy-Nagy are referenced in FLAGments and FRACKments through its absence of color. Similar to Enright’s selective employment of text, his drawings in black and white provide space for personal associations, allegiances and tenets. Although individual connections might also arise from self-imposed limitations, change begins with the realization that societal conditions and values shape and constrain our grasp of history and the moment we inhabit. Enright’s recognition and dismantling of these internal barriers pave the way for a vibrant, interconnected world.

Nicky Enright’s FLAGments and FRACKments runs through December 13th, 2024 at the Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania.