“”Stone Creature, Rumney, New Hampshire,” by Roy Money, 2013
The photographer luxuriates in the textures of rocks.
The painter feels deeply for trees.
But what about us humans?
Have we been such lousy, perhaps criminal stewards of the environment lately that artists too are finally giving our species the comeuppance we deserve and no longer love us?
That was the question that popped into my mind as I toured “One Source,” the thought-provoking new exhibition at the New Haven Lawn Club that pairs Roy Money‘s intense color photographs of walls, rocks and stone surfaces juxtaposed with the charcoal drawings, mainly of trees, by Anne Doris-Eisner.
Allan Appel Photo
From Doris-Eisner’s tree series.
When you first go downstairs from the entryway at the Lawn Club, you are greeted by Money’s 16 digital archival photographs that he took in places ranging from the canyons of New Hampshire to New Mexico to China. But unless you’re a geologist with superlative visual acumen, a rock in one corner of the world is fairly similar to that in another. Their textures are beautiful, intense, and arresting.
That is, of course, if you love rocks. Fellow artist and rock enthusiast Liz Scott (pictured) does, and the exhibition spoke to her immediately. She also loves trees, and took in Doris-Eisner’s landscapes with delight.
“These two artists complement each other,” she rightly said. “Rocks and Trees. What could be more organic!”
Because the press materials announcing the work proclaimed that “One Source” showed two different artists using nature to assert the “interconnectedness of all being,” I had very high expectations. After all, how many places are there in New Haven where you can get a dose of the interconnectedness of things? Union Station? We surely know how rocks and trees are connected, but I was searching for a human touch as well. And my expectations were not entirely unfulfilled.
“The Last Frontier.”
If Money had displayed rock outcroppings, instead of close-ups of surfaces, we might have seen crags or stoney profiles that reminded us of humans. But it’s to his credit that even in close-ups, as in “Three Rocks” and “The Void,” you can’t see the human even in the patterns. His rocks remain adamantly rocks. Not even accidental reminders of previous artists like Hans Hoffman or Jackson Pollock are evident, as if Money’s eye were a laser intent on deleting any reminder of the human touch.
In the intensity of his texture focus, the rocks take on almost their own character.
“Stone is not alive in any conventional sense; yet it contains the potential energy of its size and position. Though the rock is not moving when I make a photograph, there is a story behind how it got there, and it will eventually move again,” he writes in his artist’s statement.
It’s a tribute to Money’s single-mindedness of vision that my hope was dashed. But not for long.
Allan Appel Photo
Doris-Eisner’s subject may be trees, but they are anthropomorphic ones. They raise their limbs in tragedy and in comedy, and in some of the most moving present only details of themselves, say a notch bearing a smaller version of itself that looks actually quite human, like a baby, or a swirling detail full of energy and longing.
Her non-human materials are dramatic, and maybe theatrical to a fault, but their energy and earnestness to be more than they are are, such as in likely the most powerful piece, “Paths of Thought” (pictured), is a tribute perhaps to the power both of organic matter — there’s much more of it in a tree than in the clefts of barren rocks — and the feeling the artist unabashedly brings to her work.
Artist Photo
On this piece she has also added calligraphic elements at the bottom left and clear writing at the bottom right. For better or for worse, writing does make us human.
I left thinking about the title of that old Steve Martin and John Candy film, Planes, Trains, Automobiles, where universality of modes of transportation is suggested.
“One Source” is about images of rocks, trees, and humans as well. Only humans have to earn their way into the show through some enjoyable and worthwhile looking.
The show runs through Sept. 8. For more on hours and directions, visit the New Haven Lawn Club’s website.
