Natural Refinement: Organic takes art by the roots and (gently) pulls
by Rob Campbell
VCReporter, Monday, December 15, 2003

The enchanting and haunting art in Nathan Larramendy’s Organic is work that affects the viewer on both the ethereal and neural levels. Each of the three artists brings her own minimalistic vision to a show that is rich in its starkness and gorgeous in its simplicity, enhanced by a sheen of unadorned refinement. This is contemplative, elegant stuff—not the kind of art that’s going to leap out at you screaming “Ta da!”

Instead, the works of Lava Thomas, Mari Andrews and Laura Splan whisper strange languages that ineluctably—yet calmly, without coercion—draw you to the cores of their enigmas.

In the front gallery of Larramendy’s airy, sunlit space across from Libbey Park, Thomas’s exquisite graphite on paper portraits of disembodied human hair reveal a technique that is so meticulous, the drawings look even more life-like than photographs. Every strand is articulated, shaded just right, and given its proper depth and placement in its hank or lock. But there is also a nostalgic quality to the work that comes out through the softness of the pencil and the creaminess of the paper. In addition, all of the hair Thomas draws is gifted to her by friends, and according to Larramendy, the artist is sacramental with these gifts, keeping them in their own special boxes and pouches.

This obsessive care is obvious in the five stunning works by Thomas, each of which evokes both a personal and cosmic connection to the uniqueness of the human condition. Three of these are formal portraits of hacked-off pony-tails. They line the street-facing wall of the gallery, as solemn and intricately readable as any portraits of important personages. Thomas calls them “portraits of former selves; representations of a past identity,” and it’s true that the pony-tails give a certain impression of the varied personalities of “Lavialle,” “Lauren” and “Megan”; but what is most moving about the drawings is the intense, symbolic change the cutting of many years of hair can represent.

Near the front door of the gallery is “Curls,” a collection of curly snippets, just fallen, looking like grass cuttings or a freeform paisley china pattern; and on the far wall, in its own mellow pool of light, is a masterpiece: On a glowing piece of paper 11 feet long and three and a half feet tall is a person-sized furl of hair that pulsates with life, also acting as an abstraction that evokes mountains, roads and, especially, the movement of water. The drawing is called “Wave,” and I stood and stared at it for what seemed a small eternity, disappearing deeper and deeper into its unpretentious sumptuosness. It is as fascinating and attention-holding as a map, and meditative in the extreme. As I stood back and let my eyes blur, I apprehended the motion of the wave—which also resembles the famous woodblock prints of sinuous ocean swells by the Japanese masters—and was briefly rocked to my essence by its powerful presence.

Mari Andrews’ fragile, playful collection of small wall sculptures hangs around the corner on its own wall of the rear gallery, like a meticulously laid-out archeological dig from the royal chambers of some long-lost faerie civilization’s capitol. There is a wonderful, comfortable blending of freeform shape and artifice, and of natural and man-made materials, in Andrews’ work that gives it a joyously unencumbered quality. In fact, these objects are so charming and welcoming that I had to stop myself several times from reaching up and taking one off the wall to play with it, or to try it on. As I related to each one, I found that some had the souls of playthings, some of decorative or magical objects, and some of ceremonial garb, while others shone with pure fancy.

The materials Andrews used to make these offbeat talismans include wood, wire, seeds, stones, steel, reeds, pods, lead weights, tree moss, foam, soil, cork, beeswax, eucalyptus bark and manzanita leaves—a motley assortment of materials that work together seamlessly under the artists’ naturally integrative, becalming eye and obviously firm, agile fingers. The 31 pieces are plainly numbered—again, like objects from an archaeologist’s dig—which makes the seemingly rich symbolism of the oddly familiar items all the more enigmatic.

“#1216” is a peanut-shaped wire holding a cargo of soft, straw-colored tree moss—so adorable that I wanted to reach out and tickle it. Unobtrusively, high up in a corner, sits “#1193,” a 4-inch triangle-based sphere of twisted wire, looking like a toy forgotten by an alien child now returned to her planet, or the skeleton of a long-extinct underwater creature. Magisterially, near the center of the array, hangs “#1223,” a large, necklace-shaped piece made of curlicued wire and acorns that would look great on a particularly gigantic wood sprite emperor. “#1162,” made entirely of foam, is a supple greyish twist that makes a cheerful Celtic knot; and “#1188,” made entirely of manzanita leaves, is a burnished fan that may have cooled the face of the wood sprite emperor’s queen. Juxtaposed as they are in such close proximity, each piece is part of a larger collage that somehow manages to be both aloof and deeply intimate.

There is nothing at all aloof about Laura Splan’s unnervingly beautiful and unquestionably alive monotone paintings—monotone because she paints solely with her own blood, composing directly from her fingertips on watercolor paper. That’s just about as organic (and inexpensive!) as you can get when it comes to artistic mediums. The images she creates are intimately linked to her training as a biologist; “visual metaphors for the extreme complexity and delicate fragility of our bodies,” she calls them. Having spent many years as a conceptual artist, she recently turned to this new medium, and a certain progression can be seen even in the eight works on display here—a move towards an ever finer, more delicate stroke and wholeness of composition.

In “Involuntary Response,” the shared name of four paintings that also share the rear gallery with Andrews’ work, distinct images appear and disappear as they do when you ponder moving clouds. The flowing, foliage-like strands that intertwine on one painting suddenly become a string of neural passages, and then the burst of veins beneath a bruise. Another seems to be swaying underwater, a lone seaweed, perhaps, then quickly becomes airborne—an upside-down seed pod now free of its load, floating in the breeze. This quartet is striking and elegant in its simple, expressive poetry, like Oriental brush paintings.

Splan’s second quartet, “Thought Patterns,” is very clearly a series of intricate, fully-formed systems of fancifully rendered nerve colonies and synapse bundles, so extremely fine in detail that I found myself nearly pressing my nose up against the glass that protects these complex and mysterious little creations. As I experienced each, it drew me into the center of itself, offering me glimpses into the endlessly potential space between attraction and repulsion, comfort and pain, passion and detachment. A painless, but hair-raising, spiritual balancing took place in me as I stared into the vortices and mandalas Splan had so generously pulled from her very being.

The work of these artists is so subtly intense and passionately focused that it becomes even more outrageous in effect than Splan’s unusual medium is in concept. But Organic reaches a further realm of magic through the nearly palpable synergy that spins the show, effortlessly connecting all the dots while pointing out that each is integral to the whole—and the power of this synergy has to be experienced to be understood.

Larramendy couldn’t have conjured a better-orchestrated suite of artists if he’d raised them from birth himself. Their alternately joyful and shocking interaction urges the viewer toward a renewal of the sense that everything in the universe is intimately connected in creating life’s everlasting entirety; and that, more than an obsession with the natural, is what “organic” is all about.