Living in the Beauty of a Blue Oblivion, an essay by Eiren Caffall

Living the Beauty of a Blue Oblivion

                                                                                                                        Eiren Caffall

This spring in Chicago we had a heat wave, devastating and gorgeous at the same time.  It came in late February, a time when here the sky is a resolute grey, flat and monotone.  It is a lulling thing, that sky, hypnotic, and careful and bleak, reducing itself to a blank page afterthought, relieved of any shading, complexity or depth.

We walk under that sky for months, and the reach of it seems vast: out over the grey lake, down inside the grey concrete, up the length of the grey buildings, into the pallor of our skin. 

More than snow or bitter cold, this is the story of a Chicago winter: the grey, the flat.

But this year a riot of color broke on us in midwinter.  A sudden thaw and heat wave shook the grey out, and gave birth to early blue skies and to green grass and bright sun, then to a white and cloudless city.  The warmth brought freakish, carnivalesque alterations that set everyone in a vacation mood and left us blinking and grinning on the sidewalks, looking up at the sky with a sudden hunger for plants and swimming and consumption.

And there was greediness in the way we drew it in, as if we’d never seen beauty like that before, as if there was only one kind of summer, and it was here.  It was something we had to drown in, that beauty, something we had to have, as if our lives depended on it.

Though it was a new thing, the wrong climate, an alteration and a shift, here is what we said to each other: “Isn’t this warm spring wonderful?  Isn’t it sweet to see the flowers bloom so early?”

There is beauty in the collapse of climate change.  There is pleasure in a spring with no waiting.  And so we took our grace in ease we hadn’t earned, and we took our pleasure in beauty that wasn’t natural.  It heralded something unspeakably dangerous, was a messenger that came with bad news, but looked just like good fortune.

Humans can be lazy animals.  We thrive in the presence of unexpected sloth.  We love the blessed thaw, the simple ease of it, because of the wiring of our evolution.  Ease looks lovely to us, it looks like survival.  Beauty catches us up and makes us feel at peace, even with things we ought to fear.

None of us can pretend we do not know what that warm spring means.  We may choose to hold at bay our fear and grief.  But, whether we sit with the truth deeply or not, no one can avoid the reality of global climate and ecosystem collapse.

Beauty and pain exist as twins in every human moment and in every human heart, and to see a blazing spring day, so wrong in its temperatures, does not mean that we cease to see its beauty, nor should we.

The beauty of it keeps us alive in a way we must not lose, alive to the earth in jeopardy.

Fogelson’s vision of the earth in jeopardy in Exit Eden provides retreat, even if that Eden is corrupted by wrongness, by change. His images are gorgeous even in their destruction, the degradation of their altered landscapes.  They are full of tiny promises of nature to into which we might disappear.

Sometimes like fading Victorian postal cards, and then again like forests awash in blue flame, jungles swimming with water, painterly sweeps of acid mimicking the ocean, the photographs invite the viewer towards a fantastic version of the land, one that draws in the eye and the breath.

Fogelson’s process involves taking color Fuji film, discontinued by the manufacturer, shooting a landscape image and then distorting the image with bleach.  The emulsion of the negatives is selectively altered, removing yellow, magenta and cyan layers, to reveal what remains: blue, impossible blue.

It feels like no surprise that blue is what remains.  Blue: color of the sea and sky, continual human metaphors for the greatest mysteries, the unrevealed.

Fogelson’s blue bubbles like liquid fire, it sweeps along vistas swallowing them whole, it halos the sun, radiating something terribly wrong and ultimately seductive towards the trees within its orbit.

Blue is the color of our new horizon as a planet.  It was always the signature flag we flew out into space.  Here is our sweet oasis, that blue flag said, home of liquid water and moist winds — drinkable, vital and luminous.  Astronauts gazing back at the earthrise from our nearest celestial neighbor drew in breath at the comfort of that place they’d left behind.  And when we gaze at ourselves from that perspective, we are awake to all that feeds and nurtures us.

But, in the warming world, the world that’s coming, we will be awash in all that blue.

The rise of the seas, the startling sweeps of rain, the water where we do not want it, rising into cities, falling like a lake of tragedy from rainstorms we did not expect, subsuming what we seek to keep, absent where we most require it: water will obsess us in the world that’s coming. 

Sky, the other blue mystery, will be the silent god we look to.  Too much sun or too little, maker of hotter, blistering days, denier of rain, placid site of cloudless skies after the hurricane or derecho has done its worst, this will be the feel of the sky in the world that’s coming.

How perfect, then, that blue has always been where we’ve expected mystery to dwell.  Seat of gods, upper or lower case, the blue of the sky holds all their gruesome and magnificent power, and their coming has always been expected from a space beyond what human sight and understanding can predict.

The ocean, beneath whose depths we cannot ever see, has always been a metaphor for faith, for believing in the deep and mighty power of forces unseen but not unfelt.  Oh, God, we’ve said, thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small.

Beneath its blue surface, a life teems that we cannot ever know, and in those waters, with those spectacular and strange fishes, gods move, their powers to enforce on the lives that rest above in tension, fragility and hope.

Exit Eden’s images fade into the color blue as into those forces, as into those metaphors, so primal and so necessary to the soul of men.

But as those forces meet they meet in all the power and beauty they have, and we are standing in their wake, alive to both the pleasure and the worry of their coming.

In Fogelson’s images, chemicals and extinct media meet to form a great story of loss.  As the film he uses fades into a part of our industrial and artistic history, as the application of chemicals change the images he’s retained, Fogelson has created an Eden that we are all leaving, passing out of the time of film, beyond when the pictures were made, into a world of blue and wonder.

Oblivion awaits those of us leaving Eden, the unknown that will drown or bleach us, the coming of a world who’s newer mysteries we cannot guess. 

Like a sudden and glorious spring thaw that sends a crushing summer drought behind its beautiful perfection, we cannot be sure what those mysteries have waiting for us in their depths.

As we leave the subtle and predictable beauty of the things that came before, we are ushered into a new kind of beauty; it is a languishing, surprising and unpredictable beauty, from which we cannot look away, even when we worry it will take us with it back into the unknown from which we came.

 

 

 

Now that's my demographic...Orion Magazine

One of my images from Exit Eden is included in the September/October issue of Orion with an essay by the venerable Derrick Jensen. I am thrilled to be coupled with him on a page again (the last time was via an essay he wrote for my monograph The Time After). Derrick is as clear spoken as he is informed and angry. Even though it must feel like yelling into the wind at times he is tireless and on target. Pick up a copy or better yet get a subscription to this great publication! 

Orion Magazine  

Screen shot 2013-08-28 at 4.11.09 PM.png

"The Bus: 29 Hooligans from Chitown"

Tony Fitzpatrick is an artist who brings others work to the public via his referrals, coordinating group shows, and at his zero-commission gallery Firecat Projects. Recently he arranged a group show in LA at La Luz De Jesus Gallery which included two of my pieces.

The premise of the show was a range of talent, many early in their careers, along with some other artists such as Tony himself, me, Tom Torluemke, and others rolling from Chicago to LA in a tour bus experiencing America along the way (and saving on shipping costs). That didn't happen but the show did and it was a blast. They blogged deeply about my work afterward, check it:

http://laluzdejesusgallery.blogspot.com/

 

Current Show: "potpourri" at Linda Warren Projects

My debut show with Linda Warren Projects runs from December 14th, 2012 to February 2nd, 2013. The work is viewable online here as are shots of the installation at LWP- including the time-based sculpture titled “Fountain” documented throughout the run. Here’s the statement about this work:

Potpourri by Doug Fogelson

How ironic is it that in today’s age of ecological crisis humans cultivate exotic flowering plants, castrate their reproductive bloom, and deliver around the planet to commemorate the banal/vital moments of our lives?

My main objective in Potpourri is twofold: the first impulse is to create an installation where the viewer feels an immediate and seductive sensory experience of light, color, and form stemming directly from the actual flower material; the second is to stimulate a deeper consideration of the floral signifier and its related industrial/conceptual/spiritual meaning for the current times. References to Flemish Baroque floral painting, Abstract Expressionism, and the general history of floral depictions in art are implicit in the various presentations of this work.

Photography here is employed via multiple exposure photograms and other techniques of hand touching such as bleached still life photographs and flower “pressings” onto chemically altered sheets of 8x10 inch film. The final prints are made as archival pigment prints in editions of 6 each at the 28” inch high by 22” inch wide size (a larger size is offered in an edition of 3 each).

A central component of the exhibition is the three-tiered fountain sculpture, made of Plexiglas and decorated with a variety of fresh flowers, which is experienced as it wilts over the timeframe of an exhibition. The fountain creates potpourri. Ephemeral aspects of floral life and death are therein linked to a sort of recycling physically via the sculpture and visually in the forms as 2-D representations of the same materials on the walls.

Exit Eden

This body of work was exhibited in Chicago, Aspen, and the Netherlands in 2012. Here is the statement for the series:

Exit Eden addresses concerns about loss caused by climate change or ecocide. My work considers our planet as an "Edenic" paradise while questioning our intellectual and spiritual accountability at the current state of development. Transformative effects of climate change are made visible through the abstraction of dense landscape photography. I photograph natural areas, often using overlapping multiple exposures, and then remove layers of the film's emulsion with chemicals. Partially destroying the image mimics the state of our bedraggled resources, thus the pieces in Exit Eden become tableaux to the disappearing qualities of nature as we once knew it. Representing the issue in this manner confronts the loss of my original images, the analog color transparency, as well. Final prints are archival pigment prints in editions of 6 each, the widths vary but heights are generally between 20”-28” inches high.

Masters, Edits, and Cuts

My concern in the series Masters, Edits, and Cuts is threefold: to honor the magical contribution of the analog recording mediums Magnetic Tape (which served as the original for audio/video/informational recording) and Photosensitive Transparency Film (or slide film); the second is to reflect the process of recording itself between light sensitive material briefly physically touching the magnetic medium; the third is an attempt at visual expressions something akin to the emotional content I derive from sounds and images generally contained by such arcane media.

As the magnetic tape touches the 8 x 10 inch transparency film I appreciate machine honed precision materials as shiny miracles of science. Colored light bouncing off the magnetic tape casts rippled waves and patterns onto the film (as if to confirm the scientific phenomena) in the form and content of the sound and light based media. The tape curls are reminiscent of the roll it comes from and the analog editing process it goes through. These materials physically interact, aided by my hand and colored light in multiple exposures over an additive color mixing process, and then it's time to process the film. What remains is a temporary form revealed, a kind of self-portrait of materials used to communicate so much in the century of our massive industrial and technological growth.

Castings

The Castings series utilizes the processes of entropy and reconciliation in tandem with the photographic instant and its medium. I perform traditional photography in the natural environment- shooting scenes on film over each three-month season. The film is then processed and approximately five prints are scanned to be printed on light sensitive paper as Lambda style C-prints. I return the prints back to the same location where they were photographed and place them either faceup or facedown leaving them out for the following season. Decay and entropy work directly on the prints in the form of radiation, temperature and moisture fluxuations, insects, chemical interactions, and so on until they are collected.

The process often results in a near total abstraction of the two-dimensional images. Direct contact with the ground acts as a stencil or cast whereby nature imprints some of its form directly onto the emulsion. The print surface degrades and begins to decompose as it becomes collaged with parts of the nature it depicts, forcing a type of reconciliation between subject and object. The idea is one of non-human forces in collaboration with myself and the camera to create abstract photographic representations.

I began Castings in the summer of 2009 and documented seasonal changes at the location in Northwest Indiana for nearly two years. The prints were trimmed and encased in airtight Plexiglas vitrines, some still with dirt, leaves, etc, to be assembled in various configurations.