October 1, 2022
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Liz Ward,
"Silver River"

Kelly Berg,
"Emergence"

Yuna Kim
"Stacking, Collapsing, Stacking"
Liz Ward, "Silver River”
by Donna Tennant
Liz Ward, “Silver River,” 2022, white chalk, conté, metal leaf, watercolor, gouache and collage on indigo Japanese paper, 38 x 74 1/2”
Moody Gallery, Houston, Texas
Continuing through October 22, 2022

The Mississippi River is in Liz Ward’s blood. Born in New Orleans, her grandfather worked on the river as a steamboat captain. She is now based in San Antonio and spends her summers in rural Michigan. All of her work is informed by the natural world, but river imagery has been a dominant and consistent theme. In 2019, she produced “Floating Life,” a series of 15 large drawings inspired by maps created by Harold Fiske in the 1940s. Like these maps, Ward’s pieces depict the meandering paths of the Mississippi over time and resemble intertwining ribbons of color. 
 
“Silver River” is the title not only of the current exhibition, but of the largest of the 14 mixed-media paintings. All are executed on indigo Japanese paper, which is so delicate that it must be mounted on another sheet of paper before being framed. Ward slowly builds up the complex surface by layering watercolor and gouache with drawing and nature printing using leaves dipped in silver and butterflies dipped in gold.
Liz Ward, “Tobin Harbor,” 2021, watercolor, pastel and collage on Japanese paper, 23 x 58 1/2”
The Mississippi River traverses the surface horizontally as a wandering ribbon of silver metallic ink. Using white chalk and white conté on the dark surface, Ward outlines the bell-shaped flowers of the Indian pipe plant, also known as the ghost plant, below the silhouettes of two men standing on a rough-hewn raft. They float below a starry sky reflected in the river, which is represented by concentric circles of dotted lines. In speaking about the piece, Ward refers to Walter Johnson’s book, “River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom,” in which he writes about how the Mississippi River served as an escape corridor for slaves going north. 
 
Three pieces incorporate wax-crayon gravestone rubbings made by the artist. “In Memory Of” commemorates a man killed in the Copper Falls Mine in Mellen, Wisconsin, in the early 1900s. “Daily Labor” is in memory of William Roberts, who also died in a mining accident. The area was a source of iron ore, but operations ceased around 1930. The two graves seem to float under a weeping willow tree and above a river lined with pines. 
Liz Ward, “Rock Harbor,” 2021, watercolor, pastel and collage on Japanese paper, 23 1/4 x 58 1/4”
For Ward, making art is a “mode of inquiry,” a way to order her thoughts and “create something visually engaging to express those ideas to other people.” The layers in her work reflect her ongoing research into mythology, culture, and environmental science, as well as her personal experiences. In a large vertical piece, “Strangler Fig,” she investigates a species of plant that surrounds a tree and sucks out the nutrients until it dies, resulting in a “tree” with a hollow central core. For “Rock Harbor,” Ward covered Japanese paper with transparent washes of cerulean watercolor surrounding a sand bar on which she painted rocks in delicate shades of gray, beige, and even red. The final step was to attach to the surface small drawings of plants cut from various publications. There is a serenity to these pieces that expresses the artist’s patience and sensitivity to her materials. The result is placid and mesmerizing, much like a day spent immersed in nature.
Donna Tennant is a Houston-based art writer who writes reviews for various publications. Over the past 40 years, she has written about art for local and national publications, including Visual Art Source, Houston Chronicle, ARTnews, Southwest Art, Artlies, and the Houston Press. She has a bachelor of arts in art history from the University of Rochester and a master of arts in art history from the University of New Mexico.
Kelly Berg, "Emergence"
by David S. Rubin
Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California
Continuing through October 22, 2022
 
Kelly Berg expresses a faithful optimism in humankind’s chances of survival with a series of captivating paintings inspired by a number of artist residencies and other travels that involved hiking through rocky terrains in Southern California, Hawaii, and Italy. This, of course, is in light of the threats to the planet posed by climate change and the destructive natural phenomena it has begun to bring about. Based on her personal observations experienced living in earthquake-prone California, as well as on visits to several volcano sites and to the Giza Pyramid complex in Egypt, Berg has painted dramatic and luminescent landscapes dominated by pyramidal or triangular structures. These are integrated into natural settings featuring mammoth rocks, the aforementioned volcanoes, and, in one instance, the ocean at high tide. Mostly viewed from slightly overhead, as if photographed by approaching drones, the imagery is rendered in sepia-toned and blue-tinted palettes traditionally associated with vintage archaeological photography, in striking contrast to the brighter yellows, oranges, and purples of Berg’s earlier paintings (which also employed kitschy sculptural appendages). 
Kelly Berg, “Tunnel through Time,” 2021, acrylic on
canvas, 24 x 36”, Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery
Considering the spiritual overtones Berg brings to the new paintings via the symbolic representations of pyramids, the haloed sun, and bursts of intense light, the move to a more straightforward presentation is appropriate and effective. It both brings clarity to Berg’s vision and places her new work in the historical framework of 19th-century American Luminism and 20th-century Transcendental Modernism.

In two of the larger panoramic canvases, Berg builds upon memories from a 2019 artist residency in Naples, Italy, where she had a view of Mount Vesuvius from her studio. In “Light of Vesuvio,” the focus is on the center of the composition, which is dominated by a dormant volcano and, superimposed over it, a partially transparent Napoli obelisk that runs through its center like a spine. While dark clouds fill the surrounding sky, the obelisk emits a flame-like light from its tip, reminding us that, although the volcano has not erupted since 1944, it will again. 
Nevertheless, Berg considers such natural disasters within the larger scheme of a divine universe, an idea that she expresses by overlaying the composition with interlocking triangles that call attention to the geometric substructure of nature, the divine proportion known as the Golden Section triangle, and the Modernist tradition of representing spiritual concepts with abstract geometry. 

Three locations in the Bay of Naples — Mount Vesuvius, the Isle of Capri, and the Isle of Ischia — are barely visible across the waters in the distant horizon of “Tunnel through Time,” where the central image is one side of a pyramid with a Romanesque arcade running through it, mostly below sea level and superimposed over piles of rocks. Although Vesuvius is shown erupting at upper left and the Isle of Ischia is enduring a severe thunderstorm at upper right, the destructive forces of these natural catastrophes are dramatically countered at center by a mystical light that rises up from the deep recesses of the arcade like a Barnett Newman zip, infusing the Isle of Capri with a divine presence.
Kelly Berg, “Heart of the Earth,” 2021, acrylic on
canvas, 31 x 36”, Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery
Kelly Berg, “The Pyramids of Amboy Crater,” 2021, acrylic
on canvas, 31 x 36”, Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery
Berg examines the dichotomy of turbulence and calm in two smaller canvases shaped like inverted triangles. Each houses images of pyramids integrated with volcanoes the artist visited in Hawaii and Southern California. Viewing “Heart of the Earth,” we become witnesses to a fiery explosion of the Kilauea Volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, the most active volcano in the island complex, having erupted as recently as 2021. The painting’s warm sepia palette conveys the feverish temperament of the fire and billowing smoke that obstruct our view of a distant pyramid, itself backlit by flames.
By contrast, Berg employs cooler bluish tones to portray the dormant cinder cone volcano at Amboy Crater, located in the Mojave Desert. As with “Tunnel through Time,” this painting leads the eye on a visual progression that begins in the lower center foreground, where we peer over the top of a pyramid and then venture along a winding road towards the quiet crater that is forcefully silhouetted by an intense burst of light, another pyramid, and the radiant sun above. The concept of a spiritual journey conveyed by this sequencing recalls the similarly metaphoric structuring in the most moving paintings of 19th-century German master Caspar David Friedrich.

While Berg’s paintings reveal an acceptance of the yin/yang principle and belief in the cycles of nature, two in particular display her hope for what lies ahead. During a residency in Joshua Tree, Berg photographed pyramidal mirror sculptures that she set up temporarily in the outdoor landscape. Although three of the photographs and one sculpture are included in the exhibition, it is in the paintings “Monuments of the Future Past” and “Illumination at Giant Rock” where Berg’s ideas fully crystallize. In both, pyramids and the desert’s giant rocks and boulders are saturated with supernatural-looking light that emanates from the sun with a halo effect. In the former, the sun appears to be so powerful that it has two rings of light enveloping it. In the latter, it causes a spark to occur on the surface of a boulder, as if something miraculous is taking place before our eyes. Just as the ancient Egyptians worshiped the sun as a divine source of life, Berg calls attention to its restorative powers which, in practical terms, lie in the potential of solar energy to repair and heal the planet.
Kelly Berg, “Monuments of the Future Past,” 2022, acrylic
on canvas, 48 x 36”, Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery 
David S. Rubin is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed to Arts Magazine, Art in America, Artweek, ArtScene, Glasstire, Fabrik, Art and Cake, and Visual Art Source. He has published numerous exhibition catalogs, and his curatorial archives are housed in the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.
Yuna Kim, "Stacking, Collapsing, Stacking"
by Lynn Trimble
Yuna Kim, “Stacking, Collapsing, Stacking,”
2022, hand-drawn animation
Eye Lounge, Phoenix, Arizona
Continuing through October 9, 2022

Black curtains create a portal into “Stacking, Collapsing, Stacking,” in which Yuna Kim shows short animations of drawings that reflect her everyday experiences during the age of Covid-19. Placed between the gallery entrance and the small white-box exhibition space, the dark fabric elegantly conveys the separations of time and space inherent in the pandemic experience, while also referencing historical antecedents such as the Black Plague. 

Passing through the curtains, one first encounters a small projection in a corner just above the gallery floor, where the shifting form of a human figure on a one-sided see-saw foretells themes running throughout this body of work: identity, balance, nostalgia, anxiety, resilience, isolation, and relationships. The title of the exhibition refers to the myth of Sisyphus, which speaks to the universal struggle to find meaning amid absurdity.
Thirty hand-drawn animations are projected primarily onto three walls in rotation, which come and go like phantoms of memory and emotion. In some cases, Kim’s animations are accompanied by sound. A hand repeatedly stacks several rocks that topple down over and over again. In “Gravity” an apple breaks apart, revealing the seeds at its core. A vase with two flowers that endlessly alternate between blooming and wilting in “Flower,” alluding to the widespread death and loss experienced during the pandemic, as does a pair of hands playing a children’s game, “Rock, Paper, Scissors.” When one hand imitates a pair of scissors, it lops off a finger from the other hand. Here, Kim conveys the paradox of pandemic life with profound simplicity while illuminating its ambiguities.
Yuna Kim, “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” 2022, hand-drawn animation
Yuna Kim, “See You,” 2022, hand-drawn animation
In one particularly thought-provoking drawing titled “Prejudice,” Kim confronts the hateful rhetoric of those who’ve blamed China or Asian Americans for the spread of Covid-19 by showing a figure who’s been largely erased. Only their feet, hands, and a pair of dark round sunglasses appear in the drawing, which calls to mind the historic erasure of Asian Americans and the violence that continues to be committed against them
Some works address specific Covid-19 practices, such as social distancing. In “Ducky,” four rubber ducks alternate between coming together and moving apart. For “Laundry,” she groups six washing machines; “See You,” is a grouping of six squirrels, including one that repeatedly disappears and returns. Other works address more expansive concepts. “Blowing Candles” animates a birthday cake with a single candle that endlessly goes out and reignites, for example. The image speaks to the way Covid-19 changed perceptions of time, altered timelines for reaching traditional milestones, and shifted the practice of performing various rituals. “Burning” shows a castle’s drawbridge opening to reveal the sudden outpouring of flames. Such imagery considers the ways our views of home have been transformed by the pandemic. 
 
Kim’s animations capture a beautiful depth and breadth of pandemic experiences. Drawings of a whirling ceiling fan (“Ceiling”) and a bird making an endless loop around its perch (“Rounding”) reflect the monotony wrought by social isolation. “Tug of War” draws people pulling together on a rope, but whomever they’ve banded together to defeat is cropped out of the composition, leaving us to wonder what they’re pulling against. “I saw you looking at me” depicts a window with horizontal blinds, alternating between the view looking in and the vastly different view looking out. 
Yuna Kim, “Rounding,” 2022, hand-drawn animation
“Stacking, Collapsing, Stacking” prompts us to reflect more deeply on our personal experience of the pandemic. At the same time, the wide variances among Kim’s animations awaken our empathy for those whose perspectives on pandemic life differ, often dramatically, from our own.
Lynn Trimble is a Phoenix-based art writer whose work ranges from arts reporting to arts criticism. During a freelance writing career spanning more than two decades, over 1,000 of her articles exploring arts and culture have been published in magazine, newspaper and online formats. Follow her work on Twitter @ArtMuser or Instagram @artmusingsaz
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