Environmental Materials and
Environmentalist Sentiments
Leif Fairfield's recent exhibition, 'I'm Gonna Miss the Sea,' which was on view in July at Park + Vine, aptly encouraged awareness and contemplation about the materials and forms that make up the natural world. The exhibition's content complimented the store's mission to “ offer environmentally friendly and ecologically minded merchandise from suppliers in Cincinnati and elsewhere,” and to encourage “ people to become more aware of the environmental impacts of their consumption choices.” In three distinctly different modes of realization, Fairfield employed ink drawings, mounted photographs, and laser-cut sheets of dried seaweed towards what he referred to as a “ site specific installation.” That's a tricky phrase that is often interpreted by its users to direct the viewer's attention to the art's relationship to its context. In Fairfield's case, he makes mention of using discarded materials from Park + Vine's storeroom in the work. And while I struggled to find where these materials manifested in the works on display, I was interested in the link forged between the physical nature of his artwork and the exhibition space allocated to it within a shop.
Before visiting the exhibition, I had commented on my personal blog that the tone of the exhibition's title and the images of work being circulated in advance recalled the environmentalist melancholia of Antony Hegarty of the artful musical group Antony and the Johnsons. Sure enough, Fairfield's artist statement revealed that the exhibition's title was an appropriated bit of lyrics from the band's single Another World. Starting by admitting with resignation “ I need another world / This one's nearly gone,” the singer's soulful voice plunges into a list of natural phenomena that he will miss as this planet passes away. The elegiac piece of music is gentle and dark.
I must admit, such emotional range and sensitivity seemed only referenced rather than demonstrated in Fairfield's installation on my first visit. I found myself distracted by the art barely cresting higher than a display of pots and pans for sale, with doormats and purses and other “ green” shopping creating a barrier between my physical person and the art experience. I left thinking about how temperamental contemporary art had become and how this is a quality in art that I celebrate and take pride in. As much as art and life blend, contemporary artists are often aiming to coax something quiet and delicate out of fairly ordinary circumstances. Placing such creative acts along the edge of a bustling downtown shop did not at first seem like a wise idea.
But over several other visits, I allowed myself to be drawn into the artwork, and the commerce at stake around it became less of an issue (maybe that idea just got weary for me and it was easier to just exist with the work?). The side wall upon which Fairfield's work was displayed felt deep like water, but it was an experience you had to choose to experience, because plenty else could vie for one's attention.
The shapes and patterns cut from small sheets of seaweed recalled the types of motifs found in Maori and other traditional Oceanic art forms. These cultures prominently featured their relationships to the sea and to nature in their artwork. Angular points, interlocking shapes, and gentle spirals seem like stylizations of water eddies and undercurrents. The shapes themselves are negative spaces, cut out from the dark emerald-black sheets of seaweed. Fairfield presented these works on pins, floated slightly off the wall, as if to highlight their fragility even further.
Just to the right of the work on seaweed, two discreet drawings seemed to change and develop on different visits. If the seaweed work referenced deep waters, these drawings illustrate them almost literally through accumulated striations in various aqua shades of ink. Densely repeated marks swirl across the pages, evidence of meditative acts.
When all is said and done, I am not sure these works involve me in the places of longing and concern that the referenced song conjures. More, I am shown several ways that Fairfield himself is considering the accompanying emotions that drive the Modern Green Movement that surrounds this exhibition and the store in which it was shown. For all of my fancy leftist leanings, “ green” thinking can start to feel a bit tiresome, commercial and even unhelpful. I was reassured to discover in these small artworks a real emotional tie to the natural world that finds itself in crisis. Fairfield's simple directness, nature-quoting abstraction and care reminded me of the passion that presently compels us to look for healthier relationships with the natural world.
