It couldn’t have been more fitting and uplifting than having three stellar bands roll through my last weekend out in Magdalena, New Mexico. Echoing the three solo shows by Sarita Johnson, Estelle Roberge, and Hills Snyder at Warehouse 1-10 the gallery hosted a set of concerts organized by kind of a small array. The evening got off to a banger start with Sunjammer playing until sunset, followed by a funny, moving, heady rendezvous with Buttercup. GARRETT T. CAPPS with NASA COUNTRY brought the cosmic twang home and closed out the night, sending us off stargazing for more. Having lived a small lifetime ago in San Antonio, it was an excellent reminder of the city’s great music, and a lively opportunity to catch up to evolving trajectories. Really good music takes you places; mixed with Buttercup banter it’s a reassuring trip. Forming a preamble of sorts to their new song, “Zero Control,” Erik Sanden’s honest, vigilant words mingle and muse with the audience:
“Everything that’s happened to me — all the wonderful things and most of the hard things — it turns out had nothing to do with my efforts. And that somehow letting go of ‘efforting’ and trying to bend things to my will is liberation.”
The song was written in an individual and collective “I” about “efforting,” and in and with grief and loss. What to do with the untenable. It’s a rhetorical question that elicits as much silence as volume. Control and/or lack thereof is part of that existential circle jerk one may or may not entertain from time to time. It’s an age-old topic in philosophy often under the tutelage of (or in relation to) “free will” or lack thereof.
Hills Snyder, “Willie’s Airstream,” 2023, pencil on paper, 9 x 12 inches
What can we control? Do I want that control? Is control just hubris with a dash of conceit, or a side of fear? Perhaps for Sanden, it takes some concerted effort to create the kind of music that continues to sing long after the show’s over. So it’s that “effortless” effort that corrals rather than controls, that bends with rather than forces a way through. This is the path that the artist Hills Snyder has been drawing, and literally cutting, upon arriving in Magdalena. Once a neighboring dirt road was gated, it blocked an access point along the otherwise privately landlocked public land trail that hikes up Magdalena Peak. Entering a natural clearing nearby, Snyder began cutting a new trail following the contours of the land, mindful of its geological and biological inhabitants. This is the similar path in his drawing series Magdalena (2022-23), which follows in the footsteps of his exploratory drawing series Altered States (2016–ongoing) and Your Nowhere is My Somewhere. See You There (2017).
The drawings are based on snapshots taken in and around Magdalena, the village where Snyder and his wife took their time moving to from 2017 to 2019. Purposefully utilizing only thumbnails to choose from because that is the scale in which the content’s energy jumps out, Snyder then looks at the full-scale image a while before setting to mark. The aim isn’t to render and it’s not aimless; it is, as the artist refers to it, a “call and response” with each move or line or mark responding to the other(s) there and not there, including the empty space of the paper. Here, effort and control could be conjured like call and response, neither forcing a will rather allowing it to happen, mindful of when to stop.
The constraints are like the contours of the land posing an array of possibilities: is it best to skirt around the rock formation or accept the natural step or two it affords to the next plateau? Where Snyder ends up and what you end up seeing can be as surprising as discoveries on the trail — a petrified curvilinear stick takes on the shape of a snake or is it a leather strap having lost its stirrup? Sometimes all it takes is a gesture, a stray line alongside a pointed one, or just enough multi-hued shading as in Hop Canyon Workshop (2023) that suggests a particular place and direction fantastically unidentifiable. Hints of Prismacolor take certain moves, pink overtakes orange in line around the corner from the blue line curve in El Farolito (2022) contouring a sci-fi pictogram. They are playful and poetic. Sierra Propane (2023) renders this inference transference most acutely. It’s levitating, but also rushing toward the upper right edge, and still — caught within a perpendicular, intangible simultaneity. In this energetic stasis, ghost lines appear in traces and erasures. An indecipherable prism apparatus anchors the piece with arms adrift, maybe it’s loosely in control or dancing. The artist affirms and suggests that his “drawings are not meant to reveal anything about the base locations except maybe as a quantum fantasy. Quantum because it can’t be seen, fantasy because I’m pretending it can.”
I have zero control
I, I, I, I have zero control
Sarita Johnson had a vision: a donkey. There in her wife’s hospital room stood a donkey as though it were keeping a watchful eye — a surefooted guardian, a patient, calming figure of support. For her wife Susan Alexander, and for herself, The Equus asinus was the reassuring presence Johnson needed to draw from and draw out. Countless hours in such rooms filled five drawing books; countless hours of final drawing, color work, and learning Photoshop filled the pages of the first chapter of The Donkey in Albany (2019).
Sarita Johnson, “The Donkey in Albany,” 2024, graphic novel (excerpt)
Chapter one begins in Magdalena, where Johnson and Alexander were visiting for a future place to retire. The story starts off in a full-page rainstorm with a gray van heading down a muddy brown streaming road, green booted kids playing in the pooling waters. On the next page, behind the wheel in a deep red shirt, we learn from Johnson that they are racing back home due to Alexander’s severe and mysterious symptoms. Interspersed with the outlines, color blocks and text bubbles, a sepia toned landscape view of the high desert places us along the way as they descend towards California. There, via a series of mini flashbacks, we meet Johnson’s doting daughter, witness intimacy and vulnerability, and watch Alexander’s pending cancer diagnosis frame-by-frame. That was fourteen years ago. She passed away thirteen and a half years later.
Donkeys, a highly intelligent species, are also known for their excellent memories. It happens to be another characteristic essential to Johnson’s work as she often draws from memory together with photographs which act as placeholders. Whether she draws on paper or tablet, each “image cell” she renders is like a memory frame, winding and unwinding a story. The art of the age-old form of pictographic storytelling relies on an economy of means and an expertise in utilizing those means. Johnson masters the slightest of gestures, highlighting or exaggerating an expression, playing with color and pattern, and objects, like the knives and flames piercing down Alexander’s back yield “excruciating!” A former public-school teacher, Johnson has been drawing and coloring since she was a kid. Growing up in rural Kentucky, comic books were portals to other worlds yielding an endless supply of inspiration and respite. It is natural then that the artist would draw solace and joy from the pages of her sketchbooks, in the art of drawing a way through the untenable.
Drowning in her vigil
I can hang around
I’m told I can take it
At a time when the precarity of existence was resolutely palpable on a daily basis the world over, Estelle Roberge looked to bird sanctuaries to find sanctuary amidst the tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic. She migrated toward the Sandhill crane in particular whose gatherings at the nature preserve were a needed flight from isolation. Encumbered by the omnipotence of permanence and impermanence, the artist engrossed herself in studies — reading about birds, cranes, and all about the Sandhill cranes. She also looked to the poetic philosophy of Gaston Bachelard and his Poetics of Space. Together they created an atmosphere, a palette, a space, where Roberge could set to work and almost literally spread her wings.
Estelle Roberge, “The Book of Cranes,” 2022, collage, 7¾ x 8¾ inches
The Book of Cranes (2022) eventually emerged. An artist’s book of collage, it is drawn through cutting and placing, “cutting and recutting, measuring, tracing, drawing, coloring and pushing various colored and patterned papers on a surface.” Working with reams of gorgeous handmade papers, Roberge draws crane populated worlds in patterned forms, colored shapes, and textured grounds. The book, which is also editioned as individual collage and giclée prints, is like a vast forest of cranes within rich, textured, worlds that appear faintly recognizable and unimaginably fantastical. Some lean towards the abstract, where colored and patterned forms and grounds seem to merge across a textured field. The artist’s compositional acumen and deft attention to detail come together to create a poetic sanctuary of Robergian cranes.
At the end of her artist’s talk, Roberge shared that we “have to notice what goes unnoticed.” It sounds almost like an artists’ adage, and in all three shows, the artists have in their singular ways drawn on this. In seeing or finding or being open to other ways of drawing or being drawn through. Billed as a set of solo exhibitions, Warehouse 1-10 presents these three diverse takes on drawing by three distinct artists. In Sarita Johnson, Estelle Roberge, and Hills Snyder, gallery director and curator Catherine DeMaria has found community and kinship in natural fault lines. Echoing what San Antonio artist Chris Sauter has said of Buttercup’s music which can be applied to all the aforementioned artists and musicians––life affirming.
Submission is a form of loss
Sha sha sha
Submission is not giving up the ghost
Three Solo Shows: Sarita Johnson | Estelle Roberge | Hills Snyder was on view at Warehouse 1-10 in Magdalena, New Mexico and online at warehouse110.com.
