Wet Incantation

Featuring: Sofía Córdova, Rubens Ghenov, David Horvitz, M Jiang, John Roloff, & Julia Schwadron Marianelli / Sheppard Contemporary Gallery/ Church Fine Arts Building, University of Nevada, Reno.
Curated by Austin Pratt, “Wet Incantation” is an open and shimmering reflection on water and language. This group exhibition explores the complex and profound relationship between these two essential elements–one a fundamental resource and the other a foundation of human communication. Featuring six artists, the works in this exhibition come to meet from varying aims and positions, ranging from the use of the dynamic and ephemeral qualities of water as a literal medium, or employing linguistic elements—such as text, narration, and translation—to evoke the fluidity and complexity of water’s role in human thought and culture.
Selection of a review of “Wet Incantation” by Chris Lanier, Doublescoop.

The group show “Wet Incantation,” currently on view at the Sheppard Contemporary Gallery at UNR, combines the linguistic and the aquatic. Joining water and words as a braided theme, it encourages you to make connections between the two elements (I think it’s fair to call words an “element”—words are a fundamental element of cognition, as water is a fundamental element of the ecosphere). Both depend on flow. Curator Austin Pratt has organized a very nimble arrangement of painting, sculpture, printmaking and video, where the links across the work aren’t flatly obvious—it’s less about linking meanings than it is about leaking meanings.

At the entrance of the show is a sculpture by San Francisco-based artist John Roloff—its metal structure, initially commissioned by UNR in 1985, updated to the present moment with living plants caged in its skeleton. That skeleton is in the shape of a giant fish head that, in its simplified rendering, also suggests the hull of a ship. Grow lights illuminate the leaves of the plants, native Nevada varieties provided by the Native Plant Farm in West Washoe Valley (quaking aspen, willow, creeping snowberry, blue flax—their names register like poem-fragments). The piece was originally the second of three sculptures named “Lahontan Group I-III,” titled in tribute to the Pleistocene-era lake that covered much of Western Nevada. One can look at the ichthyosaur skeletons at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, over 300 miles from the Pacific Coast, and imagine the giants swimming overhead. Those fossilized skulls are roughly the same size as Roloff’s metal fish head. The enclosure of the growing plants made me think of seed libraries, preserving localized genetic diversity, and within that ship-hull form, it seemed set on a voyage to the future (even as the scale of the head gestures the other direction, to the Pleistocene).
 


The Lahontan Group I-III, 1985-87

Comprised of three related projects, Ancient Shoreline ((Island for Lake Lahontan) and Talking Tree/Glacial Epoch, commissioned by Walter McNamara for the University of Nevada, Reno in 1985 and 1987 respectively, and Vanishing Ship (Greenhouse for Lake Lahontan), commissioned by the UC Berkeley Museum in 1987 for their MATRIX exhibition series, curated by Constance Lewallen.

Inspired by the disappearance of Lake Lahontan and as an elegy for the Ice Ages, The Lahontan Group I-III, was initiated by a commission of the kiln project, Ancient Shoreline (Island for Lake Lahontan) in 1985, which fired to nearly 2000 degrees F., the 20 ft. diameter, Black Coral Starfish Element, composed of black clay slip dipped sage and veins of turquoise glaze. Talking Tree/Glacial Epoch, engages a rebuild version of the “fish head” component of Ancient Shoreline.., in a symbolic conversation between the Pleistocene (ice age) represented by the artificial snow encrusted fish head, and the Anthropocene/Holocene (contemporary) climate represented by white alder trees, entangling and elevating the metal structure as it grows. Vanishing Ship (Greenhouse for Lake Lahontan), contains misting water and sediment from Pyramid Lake, in a sealed greenhouse, test tube-like environment, installed near a source of sunlight, encouraging chemical and biological interactions within.

Ancient Lake Lahontan was an enormous endorheic lake that existed during the Pleistocene, ice ages, covering much of northwestern Nevada, extending into northeastern California and southern Oregon. At its peak approximately 12,700 years ago (“Sehoo Highstand”), the lake had a surface area of about 8,500 square miles (20,700 km_), with its largest component centered at the location of the present Carson Sink. The depth of the lake was approximately 800 feet (240 m) at present day Pyramid Lake, and 500 feet (150 m) at the Black Rock Desert. Pyramid Lake and Walker Lake are among the last living, Anthropocene/Holocene, remnants of Lake Lahontan.

The fish and starfish-like imagery for Ancient Shoreline (Island for Lake Lahontan) and Talking Tree/Glacial Epoch are related to both the Nevada state fossil, the Ichthyosaur, an immense fish-like creature of the Mesozoic Era and Native American stories of large creatures living in lakes of that region, in particular, Lake Tahoe, the natural, primary source of water for contemporary Pyramid Lake connected to Lake Tahoe by the Truckee River, which is also the ultimate source of the water included within Vanishing Ship (Greenhouse for Lake Lahontan).