Stillness fills the room, the palpable stillness of long waiting, of deep thought, of a tremulous breath in the face of unfathomable power. The gallery is vast and unobstructed, the art on the walls restrained in palette and tone: quiet elegance belying a radical nature.
“Stan Welsh: On Land—On Water” at the Triton Museum is a body of 17 works completed in 2010, in which the artist boldly departs from the style, form and subject matter for which he has gained international recognition during a distinguished career. Welsh introduces herein a new formal and allegorical language, integrating disciplines in an unique way to create potent meditations on humans within nature.
“Where water meets land,” Welsh writes, “is where the known meets the unknown,” creating “a sense of longing, vulnerability, anxiety.” A longtime surfer, Welsh spends many hours with his back to the land, looking with anticipation into the watery distance. In this exhibition, Welsh forces the viewer into that same perspective.
Each work is a composite of at least two rectangular images: a large steel-framed photograph of a horizonless body of water and a sheet of grainy plywood perhaps stained with clay, coated with shiny black paint or covered with gold leaf. Narrow steel shelves emerge from the rectangles, supporting one or more evocative figures of red clay or porcelain. A few found objects appear. From these elements and their relationships, Welsh conjures a world of meaning and metaphor.
A substantial, firmly knotted rope dangles from a horizontal plywood panel joined to a same-sized photograph below. At the base of the photograph, standing on a small steel shelf, a stylized terra cotta figure of a woman in a shawl turns her beautiful face away from the viewer to gaze with intensity at the water. Life Line uses the interaction of these four elements to consider the relationship of humans and the sea, the knotted rope suggesting the efficiency and vulnerability of the mariner; the plywood grain suggests a turbulent sky, the woman’s gaze a sense of loss and longing. Where is this lifeline?
In Mustang, completed during the recent Gulf spill, a familiar hood ornament gallops over a photograph of glistening water. Next to this, a panel of dense oily black reflects a standing figure of the purest white, face completely covered: unsullied but impotent. In Pilgrim, a calf outlined in gold rests on a precarious ledge dangling over the ocean. Such animals and birds represent to Welsh, “lost and weary travelers in a world hard to navigate” while human figures like the trio of clowns and dunces in Rendezvous, seem consistently lost, distracted, clueless.
This bold exhibition continues through November 28. Read more of The Exhibitionist at KUSP.org.
