introducing tree sapp magazine

Dear readers,

The Nature Club Collective is officially going to print as Tree Sapp!  Not only will we be releasing a 40+ full-colour, hand-bound book, but this blog will move on over to our brand new website. In the next few weeks we’ll also be expanding content to include book reviews, shorter interviews and collaborative projects. If you are interested in becoming a contributor please send a non-fiction writing sample and a quick hello! to treesappmag@gmail(dot)com. Below I’ve included preview photos from a few articles that will go up in early March!

I’d also briefly like to thank everyone who has offered feedback and encouragement the last few months. And to quell any suspicions, Nature Club Collective is still real and strong! Please keep your ear to the ground and invite yourself along to our upcoming beach house headquarter sleepovers, and attempts at creating a mid-ocean multi-raft armada picnic extravaganza. Moby Dick will, however, not be read, as I’ve given up. He had me at whalebone wigwams and lost me somewhere in a sea of exhaustive verbosity. It can’t be helped!

And on one final note, if you are in the Portland area, please join us at Valentine’s March 1st for our release party. You can check out our little book in the flesh and stay for  bands, the raddest DJ around, projections, letterpress’d tokens, and a nature club photobooth!

all the very best and every tomorrow worth drawing,

Anika Sabin

ryan mcginley + muse

Recently skimming through Ryan McGinley’s portfolio,  I stumbled on a rad spread for Muse back in 2009.

Admittedly, it’s hard for me to get into modern portraiture… but for some reason these transcend my cynicism. There’s a real tenderness in his more candid projects that somehow gracefully translate to portraits.

He began in the late ’90s, documenting graffiti artists and skate culture but has since tackled more nature-centric works including a recent show exploring underground caves, entitled Moonmilk.

After a solo show at the Whitney in 2003 (at a ripe age of 24, and the youngest artist to snag a solo there), he began to really dive into the human body within nature.  In his show I Know Where The Summer Goes, much of the photography documents this dreamy, washed out vision of summer landscapes and an addled naked youth.

I’m gonna come out and say I really like this large-scale work, but it’d be silly not to note that a ton of distracting hype has gone up around McGinley, not only for hangin’ with the late Dash Snow, but because some find his works a bit too American Apparel-without-the-clothes. I wouldn’t of made that connection, but I can see where they’re coming from.

In any case, the Muse spread has its moments. I especially love the raccoon portrait because it reminds me of my dad. Not in the look of the guy… but one of my favourite stories my dad has told me is of the 3 years he lived in a Vermont barn with his Danish wife and a raccoon that would come in and out. At night the raccoon would slink in and sit atop his head, reach into my dad’s mouth and play with his teeth. Anika Sabin

céleste boursier-mougenot

I actually have Zimoun to thank for directing me over to the London gallery, Barbican and their new commission for the Curve, a sound installation piece by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. Known for being both a composer and sculptor, Boursier-Mougenot has been combining the two disciplines since the early 90s.

Harmonichaos is one of my favourites; an installation in which 13 vacuums are attached with harmonicas, while the vacuum motors are connected to motion/sound frequency sensors . As visitors enter, ambient noise is picked up and the barrage of  harmonica’d vacuums turn on in slow waves of recognition. In his latest, 40 zebra finches are set-up with a playground of guitars, among other instruments and objects, creating an unpredictable and compelling soundscape.  Check out the video below, gah I love the bird with the little twig.

zimoun + woodworms

Zimoun, a Swiss autodidactic, isn’t exactly a likely subject for a Nature Club piece. For years, alongside Pe Lang,  he has created sound sculptures and environments revolving around precise and rhythmic mechanics. Yet, this isn’t to say the works produce industrial, monotone sounds. Zimoun’s work is totally movement based, where visceral, fluid, almost water-like noise can often come through. And as recently as 2009 Zimoun filmed woodworms working away at a log (see below!).

I’d love to see more amplified nature/ gnawing noises in the future, though at the moment he seems pretty busy installing a piece  at La Rada. The work involves 30,000 plastic bags sizzling against each other, moved by 16 ventilators.

Click here for a video collage of more reductionist work, and keep your eye out for the wall of pendulum motors, whoa.

urs fischer + you

You may have noticed that entries have been few and far between lately. We’ll be picking up the pace again as everyone settles back into Portland. Nature Club has been on unofficial hiatus as key members tour the states with various other projects and bands (and a certain illustrious graphic designer takes time to heal his broken collarbone).

As for me, submerged in New York for a spell kept me in gallery mode, which brings us to this week’s find! Standing in complete physical opposition to our previous post on the Earth Room, Urs Fischer’s installation “You” guts the Gavin Brown gallery, leaving ’em with a $250,000 bill and a 38 x 30 crater in the heart of SoHo.

I came across Fischer this winter via a pretty scathing review of his New Museum three-floor take over, Marguerite de Ponty. And while the institution that is Roberta Smith seemed more keen on the show, my enthusiasm had already begun to wane. He seems to be a bit of a mixed bag of innovative surrealism, hyperrealism, and constant nods to prior art movements. Yet his work also has a kind of contrived art-star ala Jeff Koons feel to it. Which makes me puke a little in my mouth.

That said I can’t deny that “You” is a profound gesture. The work is not only physically engaging but also drenched in art historical critique, nodding to earth art’s broad manifesto to re-evalute gallery/museum space, while literally taking a jackhammer to the sanctity of it.

I’m not going to indulge further on the art historical relevance , but if you’re interested, Jerry Saltz basically ties this installation to every piece of art ever made. Over the top? Yes. Bit of a stretch? Maybe. Please don’t ever use the word mojo again? That’s directed at you Saltz. Still some interesting thoughts nonetheless. Stay tuned shortly for a Nature Club piece not at all related to dirt in or out of a gallery!

the earth room + mud wrestling

Most know Walter De Maria for the Lightning Fields out in Western New Mexico (his rumored response to Stonehenge), but since 1977 a  3,600 square foot loft in SoHo has housed another project, the Earth Room. It’s wedged right off the crowd-infested street of Prince, above the commercial district of Wooster St. where loft space goes for over $3 million a unit (yikes!). And for thirty some years the 280,000 lbs of dirt have been raked and cared for daily (so nothing grows-though sometimes mushrooms appear). That is until 2004, when the Earth Room saw a ’bout of mud wrestling.

One of the things I love about earth art, is that the work interacts with time in ways other mediums don’t. They invite change, and in effect, are documents of age. (How many times will the now calcified Smithson jetty submerge and re-emerge under water?) Works can shift, decay, erode and, in the case of the Toyshop Collective, be completely body slammed. The video is a little on the low-quality side, but definitely worth the watch. Click on the screen cap for the full onslaught!

It took my former museum guard heart a second or two to thaw out, but this is seriously rad. The work comes from some of the same kids who pulled off the Miss Rockaway Armada, complete with a voyage down the Mississippi and consequent Mass Moca jungle gym installation.  Only downer now: my undeniable itch to get body slammed into a work of art…with the only exception probably being Smithson’s pile o’ glass.

It was noted in a recent Washington Post article that the Earth Room is becoming a popular destination these days, what with all the eco-chic trends running about town. William Powers also has a wonderful exchange with Bill Dilworth, the Earth Room keeper, and furthermore made me aware  of the fact that de Maria was in the Velvet Underground for a hot second..!!

yochai matos + flame(gate)

In stumbling upon Israeli artist Yochai Matos, there might have been a slight jaw drop. I feel like Matos resolves a lot of problems I sometimes have with Dan Flavin. Actually, I didn’t think I had problems with Dan Flavin until I saw this tonight. But this piece makes me want to stake every Flavin piece i’ve ever seen into the soil of a forest like a pup tent. Instead of lighting up an opaque gallery wall, this piece illuminates the freaking woods. (note: Matos does do light installations within the gallery environment that i’m inevitably less taken with). He also uses varying tones of yellow, white and gray bulbs that interrupts an otherwise monochrome installation. Kinda like an indian corn lightning bolt, no?

On a sad note: my research fails me, and I can’t for the life of me figure out where this installation stands…stood? Damn.

kendra larson preview + studio visit

A few blocks from Nature Club Headquarters in NE Portland, painter, Kendra Larson’s studio resides. This past Friday she was kind enough to show us around, and even unwrap some of her older work.

I was originally introduced to Larson via a show at Valentine’s where three works, including Hideaway (photo 3), currently hang. If you’re in the Portland area I would definitely urge you to go see these mystical paintings in person to get the full effect of both her scale and experimentation with mediums and texture (fur, wire, thickly applied paints).

I feel like I can liken my first experience with Hideaway to Rauschenburg’s Bed. While Rauchenburg thought he’d have to worry about people crawling in to fall asleep between the sheets, many critics interpreted his work differently, seeing a violence in the paint. Hideaway elicits a similar duality.  You feel compelled to crawl in, but at the same time, there is also a feeling of loneliness and unknown.

Her work constantly challenges our relationship with nature, as well as, how and what nature becomes without us. Both Mt. Hood (photo 9) and her fire signal paintings document the unexplained. Other works like,  Northwestern Lights approaches a night sky through Agnes Martin’s grid systems, confronting how minimalism can be applied to nature.

Larson recently completed her MFA at the University of Wisconsin where she began exploring her nostalgia for the Northwest landscape,  and larger notions of home and myth. She has continued to work in these themes upon her arrival back to Portland, while experimenting and expanding her work with different material. The morning we arrived in her studio she was doing a small study with colorful wires!

Keep your eyes sharp for a full-page layout of Larson’s work as well as an interview I recently did with her, in the upcoming issue of Tree Sap launching at Valentine’s March 1st! Anika Sabin

Photos 3, 7, 8, 9 are taken from her website, other photo credits go to John Wagner.

mariele neudecker + the sunken village

Outside Münster, Germany in the river of Tiggelsee, British artist Mariele Neudecker has sunk a village! Sunken Village far exceeds her usual, as Neudecker often creates terrains in small-scale installation and in little glass vitrines. This is a permanent installation in the river that, at least for me, evokes a feeling of loss, but also of total magic in creating this new above water terrain. (Let’s picnic on the steeple of the church please?)

From her arctic dioramas to video projections and forest terrariums, Neudecker confronts an environment that often feel unapproachable, while forests feel anxious and dark. The titles of many of her works echo this…Sunken Village (2001), Unrecallable Now (1998-2001) etc.

It also seems she’s taking after the romantic 18th-19th cen. notions (from Kant to Victor Hugo) of landscape being an archetypal sublime; where the horror and harmony of being within unmeasurably vast nature is explored. I feel like Unrecallable Now could be transcending straight outta the opening scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where we find ourselves on an arctic desert.

Neudecker focuses on the environments under an intimate microscope by dissecting a portion of terrain and showcasing it, yet she’s also creating distance in these impenetrable micro-environments encased in glass. Though this photo of her engaging in the work is completely rad. I also can’t help draw comparisons to the impending winter in Portland as my feet are always cold, and seem to be perpetually soaking in this arctic mountain range. !

Ahh post-modern approaches to nature…this makes me want to explore all the other approaches to nature, new wave nature, romantic nature, minimalist nature, fluxus nature… i’ma work on this.

behind my eyelids for awhile

Camera Obscura: View of Landscape Outside Florence Looking East Toward Where Galileo Died in Exile. Italy, 2009

Camera Obscura: View of Landscape Outside Florence in Room With Bookcase. Italy, 2009

Abelardo Morell