Installation view of “Anthology”
Like many English words, the term anthology traces its etymology to Greek antiquity. Finding a direct root in the Greek word anthologia, an anthology in its purest sense translates as “flower gathering.” The poet Meleager of Gadara coined the term in the first century BCE when he published his Anthologia as the first known anthological compilation. In its preface, Meleager describes its included epigrams (or pithy poems) as a headband of woven flowers, henceforth a synonym for a collection of literary pieces.
Anthologies dust off and refocus themes. They form fresh connections through sequential proximity and unconsciously sculpt an assemblage of found objects. Through the deft direction of an editor, or in this case, a gallerist, these formations reanimate the broken streetlight at a dark intersection. In his most recent show, David Shelton architects such a project, crafting a visually poetic Anthology.
Shelter as protection from the natural world invented society, and by definition, formed civilization. Contributing to nature’s safety remains one of modernity’s greatest assets and most consequential criticisms: as settlements repelled the beasts and their burden, they forever mutated its natural state of being. Instead of the ancient necessity to flee nature for peace of mind, retreating to the calm of nature is an evolved modern luxury. Part of Anthology’s success comes from the relativity between shelter and nature: think about the lung-filling reset on the first night of a camping trip, or that first night’s sleep upon returning to a familiar bed.
Installation view of “Anthology”
Anthology knows what it is. It avoids the impenetrable jargon and conceptual inaccessibility of some of its peers. It discards the needless — although sometimes purposeful — complexity so often used to obscure hollow ideas. It opts instead to stimulate our primal urge to comprehend the utility of natural beauty.
Perhaps more than any other natural habitat, navigating tropical jungles demands calculated depth perception. The thickness that preserves its beauty also heightens its horror. Focusing too intensely on navigating the never-ending horizon of branches and vines often proves fatal for outsiders: in dodging the thorned vine, you trample the deadly viper. Since objects naturally shrink at a distance, landscape painters either chase its depth or accept it as flatness. Instead of endlessly chasing this vine-laden dragon, Austin-based painter Erin Curtis accepts impenetrability as strength in her Hanging Gardens. Despite embracing the decorative flatness of the picture plane, Curtis remains curious about surfaces and spaces. Curtis intertwines several rings of cut canvas to construct a pair of hanging loops in the Hanging Garden, a move that accentuates both the limitations and possibilities of a two-dimensional surface.
Works by Sara Frantz and Erin Curtis in “Anthology”
In contrast, is the tactility of Sara Frantz’s plaster and gouache-encased flora and fauna. Taking on the quality of heavily textured impasto paintings, these biological amalgamations ooze primal sensuality. Like bubbling lava or rippling mud that hardens over time to similarly encase natural objects, these paintings on panel feel both geological and archeological.
Because of its obsessive symmetry, endless repetition, and dizzying allure, covering a room in wallpaper is a bold statement. Either in horror or disgust or amazement, few design choices induce as many gasps. Forcefully evicted or awkwardly displaced from space and time and it’s dated. In sync and native or rehoused and reborn and it’s timeless. Shelton’s decision to conceptualize shelter as wallpaper hits hard. Instead of exhibiting paintings of natural flora alongside reproductions on floral wallpaper, Shelton eliminates any competition by curating sedate patterns, colors, and textures
Works by Jessica Halonen and Raychael Stine in “Anthology”
Jessica Halonen’s wallpaper paintings forgo symmetry in favor of off-kilter compositions. Instead of displacing natural flowers on two levels — once in painting and again in wallpaper — she opts for delicate geometric patterns. Although these geometric themes dominate, she does include the occasional floral reference. Take Wallpaper 69 (Landscape) for example, where she offsets the predictability of stable geometry with a central portal, a hazy, almost impressionistic peek into the natural world outside. This mysterious window, like a phase shift between internal and external worlds, recalls a similar energy found in Cy Twombly’s Untitled suite of green and white portals at the Menil Collection’s Twombly Gallery.
In the similarly delicate Specimen 41 & 42 (bouquets and marble), Halonen balances paisley accents with an off-center — and seemingly malleable — slate of marble. The creased marble sheet appears paper thin as it projects off the canvas in a trompe-l’oeil illusion.
Installation view of “Anthology”
In middle lover (late spring color bowl), Raychael Stine conjures ethereal environments locked in a cosmic soup of suspended gravity, where flowers float and flee away, behind, and through. The composition feels at once shallow and cavernous. And although these floral objects float freely in a sea of saturated color, the symmetrical and stable background houses them in harmony. Unlike the unpredictable asymmetry of Halonen’s individually cropped wallpapers, Stine’s amorphous forms are bound by stable symmetry.
The self-contained interplay between interior and exterior dissolves at the end of the gallery, with the dead-end surface covered in pale green strips of implied wallpaper. Combining all of Anthology — its flowers, wallpaper, outside, inside and their intersections — it bookends the show as a possible introduction or conclusion.
Complimenting this prevailing subject matter, the pieces pose similar questions of accessibility, or the seductive tension between beauty, temptation, and desire.
Anthology showed at David Shelton Gallery from July 12 to August 24, 2024.
