Observer Art Reviews: Elmhurst Art Museum’s “Sustenance & Land”

Whether through landscape paintings, still lifes of fruit, decorative floral wallpaper or candid photos of cats, the natural world provides fodder for art. On one hand, this repurposing of nature is a kind of consumption—art feasting on the natural world for the delectation of greedy viewers. Or it might be that the relationship is healthier and reciprocal: art draws life-giving attention to the beauty of the natural world, contributing to its preservation, which in turn preserves or inspires art, like rain feeding rivers that run to the sea only to become rain again.

In “Sustenance & Land” at the Elmhurst Art Museum, six(ish) artists examine the ambivalently hungry relationships between aesthetics and place. The show, to some extent, pushes back against the aesthetic and history of landscape painting in which nature is displayed as unspoiled and ripe for ingestion. But the artists here also think about consumption as a natural and not necessarily ugly or awful part of artmaking. We need land to sustain us, after all, and maybe vice versa.

Liz Chilsen, Elmhurst’s manager of exhibitions and collections and the curator of “Sustenance & Land,” told Observer that the show was inspired by the museum’s acquisition of landscape photographs by Joseph Jachna and Michael Tropea. The photos, displayed in the museum’s adjacent McCormick House Gallery, were taken in the Midwest in the second half of the twentieth century. Jachna’s images often render nature into abstractions, as in striking images of water as rushing curves and lines. Tropea’s photos are landscape shots of industrial sites that aestheticize dystopian angles and rust. When putting together the new exhibit, Chilsen was looking for other work that spoke to “the sense that you get from those photographs of connection and human integration with the land.”

The artwork in “Sustenance & Land” closest to Jachna and Tropea’s is probably Tomiko Jones’ haunting Rattlesnake Lake, a series of images captured at a former Indigenous site that was deforested and turned into a town for American settlers before being flooded and used as an overflow reservoir for Seattle. The photos show a single woman standing in the lake and on the shore amidst dozens of massive severed tree stumps.

Jones deliberately evokes Western landscapes and the narrative of Manifest Destiny. But the images here aren’t the ‘before’ of a pristine, untouched land ready for exploitation. They’re the ‘after’—a place that shows the scars of being used, consumed and used again. Jones, in her artist statement, says she washed the photographic film in the river water, leaving residual markings of dirt and leaves on the prints. The images mourn the loss of the trees and the space even as they, in some sense, consume the lake for their own production.

Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman’s Processed Views are also directly in conversation with the landscape tradition. Using the work of photographer Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) as an inspiration and jumping-off point, the pair (who prefer to be labeled as a single artist) photographed diorama landscapes created from Froot Loops, candy and Doritos. The resulting images are hyper-saturated, surreal alien landscapes that are simultaneously repulsive and seductive.

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“Watkins’ pictures are so perfect and classical,” Lochman told Observer. “And he had one foot in commerce and another foot in his love of Yosemite and the beauty.” Exploitation and the love of nature as inextricable? “His photos were used as an advertising tool and also as one that helped preserve Yosemite,” Ciurej pointed out. For the artists, there is a parallel in the way that corporations market sugared, processed food, which in turn has transformed eating habits and land use, with acres and acres of corn rising in preparation for its final rendering into overly sweet syrup.

Though the images are in some sense critiques, Ciurej noted that “there are many points of entry.” She had a conversation with a woman who had grown up without a lot of money and who saw the images in Processed Views as “dream landscapes, because they could never afford the name-brand foods.” Landscapes always turn nature into consumables, but that is inflected differently for those who do the consuming and those who are out of the (fruit) loop. The simultaneously grotesque and mouth-watering images can provoke giggles, awe, guilt, desire or all of those at once.

Claire Pentecost’s work, meanwhile, moves further from landscape traditions. Her piece Our Bodies, Our Soils is a multi-tiered installation of apothecary bottles of all sizes that are filled with soil—mostly from Chicago gardens, with outliers from as far away as the state of Georgia (where Pentecost grew up) and Panama (where Pentecost has traveled recently).

“There’s a continuum between the health of our soil and the health of our bodies,” Pentecost told Observer. “Soil is a social practice, so how you treat your soil is going to have consequences.” In the installation, soil is presented as a kind of medicine—the landscape beneath our feet turned into a landscape of the body that is also a landscape of art. Caring for the earth, caring for our health and caring for the pleasures of our senses (in the form of soil samples that visitors are encouraged to smell) are all interrelated. Consumption isn’t just destruction. It’s also an act of participation in a natural world that humans observe but are also part of.

The work that initially seems least attuned to nature and vista is Chunbo Zhang’s Food Treasure series. Zhang’s paintings juxtapose greasy American foods with Chinese containers and imagery. In Deep Dish Pizza, for example, a slice of Chicago’s signature pizza trailing cheese is pulled from a delicate dish with a red dragon painted on the side—the deep dish here is partly dough and partly porcelain, blending cultural iconography.

‘Land’ in Zhang’s work isn’t a broad view of mountains, trees, industrial plants or even sugary sweets. Rather, land is where you see yourself as belonging—which often is intimately tied to where and what you eat. Zhang’s paintings position her as belonging in Chicago and China by framing her as a consumer in Chicago and China—and as a creator in and of both. Her art is not a representation of nature, except in the sense that humans are part of nature, so what we do and eat and how we move and migrate are natural, too. Zhang belongs in “Sustenance & Land” because it’s a show about what sustains us: land, food, nature, thought and art.

“Sustenance & Land” is at the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois through April 27.