I Am Nature

The title for this show is a reference to a meeting between Jackson Pollock and Hans Hoffman.

In 1942 Lee Krasner invited her former teacher, Hans Hoffmann, to visit Pollock’s studio. After some time looking at Pollock’s paintings, Hoffman noticed that there were no still lifes or models. He then said to Pollock, “You do not work from nature. This is no good, you will repeat yourself.  You work by heart, not from nature.” Pollock answered: “I am nature”.

This story represents the Dionysian vision that Pollock and his peers felt about their process of discovery. They believed that they were delving into the deepest mythic aspect of being. Their ethos was to liberate the creative forces that surge through consciousness and touch the creative spark that animates life.

Pollock did indeed believe that we are nature; that in our raw untethered state we breathe with the pulse of autumn rhythms, the cadence of the stars and tidal movements as they swell and swoon. A vision he ultimately realized in the epic canvases he painted in the 1950’s.

This exhibition is a look through this lens of what “I am nature” means to a group of contemporary artists working today. Some of the artists create work that focuses on the ever-expanding ideas that attempt to define the elusive contours of this living universe. I have asked other artists in this exhibition, whose work is not primarily about nature, to create work that reflects a response to this theme.

When Jackson Pollock said, “I am nature” in 1942, the knowledge of space exploration, dark matter, black holes, DNA and cloning were unknown or only speculated upon, at the outer margins of science. The world that we now live in, with nuclear weapons and the impact that civilization has had on the environment, are realities that were unknown at that time and have altered our understanding of ourselves and nature.
Indeed we are nature, and the creative act is fundamentally an expression of the deep currents and rhythmic pulse of life. With wit and alacrity, this show seeks to explore the philosophical implications of what these words mean to artists in the 21st century.

– Gary Brewer, curator