3 Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now
The New York Times
JoAnn Verburg’s olive trees, captured on three continents; Joshua Marsh’s new landscape paintings; and Cameron Spratley’s collage paintings.
The images of olive trees in California, Israel, and Italy that make up “For Now,” JoAnn Verburg’s current show at Pace, are resplendent, enigmatic, and a kind of feint; Verburg’s real subject is time and how it’s experienced. The multiple frame photography and video works, lavishly textured and devotionally rendered, operate as Delphic objects, portals to nature. Of course, a climate-controlled gallery is far away from nature, but the power of Verburg’s images is such that even if they don’t exactly transport you to the stillness of the Umbrian countryside, you feel like they could, and the small gravity between those ideas is momentarily erased. The interplanar effect is heightened by a few formalist flourishes. Verburg, who returns to olive trees like Morandi to his bottles, uses a vintage large format camera (the kind with bellows), which affords trippy swings in focus. Background, foreground, and mid-ground shift within the same composition. The gnarl of a tree trunk torques into velvet and sharpens back up. A close-up glamour shot of some young olive trees is so intimate as to be intrusive, while the canopy line behind them fuzzes out into broccoli florets, but in a sequential panel, the effect is reversed, a check on photography’s claim on the decisive moment. Here, as in reality, there are endless ways of looking. The groves’ uninhabited air is also a kind of trick. These are working farms, tended to and fussed over. But people appear here only sparingly, obscured by branches, seemingly lost in thought. Their presence both disrupts the dream and provides a tether. Verburg is less interested in capturing the truth of any particular moment than creating the conditions for that moment to exist in perpetuity. The video works especially, with their birdsong and softly dissipating mist, suggest the anticipatory energy of some coming thing, which of course never does. Time progresses and then loops back on itself. There’s only you and the trees and the gallery attendant, for as long as you’re all standing there.
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