In the midst of a mounting crisis, reflection is difficult. But art can provide such meditation in an emergency (per Frank O’Hara). Some artists, such as these four, remind us that climate is not simply happening to us, but is us.

“Noise” does not fall only on the ear. The term refers to the production (and reception) of inchoate effect, extraneous to what we consider productive and sustaining. An antidote to noise (per the title given to an artwork in the exhibition) is not necessarily quietude, or even harmonious sound. It refers to a balancing of noise with “signal,” a clear stream of information that can be apprehended.

Nature’s most evident representative in art is the landscape. Astrid Preston has addressed landscape themes throughout her career, and here presents some of her most abstracted interpretations of ecological space. Their coherent compositions and restrained palettes mirror the self-sustaining order of nature itself, a faceted portrayal of a phenomenon we inhabit but rarely and scarcely comprehend.

One easily grasped facet of the phenomenon of nature is life. In their vast mobility, birds embody this facet succinctly and even poetically. Lisa Segal demonstrates this, but she also sees life in human comprehension: we are the animal that reasons. And speaks. Birds, notable among other creatures, maintain sonic communication — signals amidst the noise of the world — but we maintain language itself, with all its glorious structure and nuance.

In creating structures out of found and manipulated objects, Laurie Yehia further valorizes the abilities of humankind; specifically, her current focus on wall switch plates in most of her assemblages bespeaks our harnessing of natural forces to human needs. That harnessing, of course, is fraught with both danger and excess, and Yehia’s aggregations, realized in often jarring colors, allow in some representative noise. But in the end, the signal coheres.

Margaret-Anne Smith addresses and expands upon an even more elemental signal, simple mathematics — more specifically, geometry. Whether expanding upon basic trigonometry or revealing the fractal qualities of every finite shape, Smith does not simply ply a Neo-constructivist mindset, but uses the studio as a laboratory for perception, opening up our comprehension of the world as a site of and framework for experience.

These artists regard that experience as fundamental to human awareness and to the human need to make art. Art is not an escape from noise — noise is not escapable, but it is counter-weighable. Rather, art is an alternative, perhaps palliative, to noise, a projection of human reason onto the seeming madness, and increasing violence, of nature. In this regard, art is longer than life, and nature is us.

 

Los Angeles, February 2020