Shifting Surfaces: Roberto Fernández Ibáñez, Tanja Geis, Stephen Bruce
Summer 2016
Desai | Matta Gallery
Mountains and mathematical graphs: landscapes similar in shape, but opposite in essence. Behind the ephemeral financial status of companies or countries and the changes in environmental and social trends, lays the serene presence of perennial, undulated mountains that call me to inner peace and reflection. ~ Roberto Fernández Ibáñez
In the fifth exhibition of the Cumulus series, artists Roberto Fernández Ibáñez, Tanja Geis, and Stephen Bruce transform material surfaces into visual riddles, ascribe objects unexpected meanings, and point metaphorically towards our rapidly changing environment.
I first saw Roberto Fernández Ibáñez’s Mountains of Uncertainty at FotoFest, an international photography biennale in Houston; this year’s theme of environmental change on the planet parallel those of the Cumulus series at CIIS. In Ibáñez’s elegantly understated images—created through the artist’s own alchemical recipe based on the mordançage technique—the silver emulsion rises off the photographic paper, becoming a malleable medium to reshape. Visual data graphs are source material as the artist translates the abstraction of economic trends—data points—into unstable, if beautiful, landforms.
Tanja Geis mines the intertidal zone. Mud gathered from the flats of Richmond Bay becomes a painting medium for the totemic constructions of Littoral Daemon II and III. On closer inspection, the ornate patterns reveal images of trash entangled in organic matter, modeled after the artist’s photographs made while walking the mudflats. In 500 years, what difference will it make? I references the minimum time it takes for plastic to decompose; for this installation she collected debris washed to the shores of the Marin Headlands, and arranged them through shape and rhythm to blur the distinction between the organic and the manufactured. In the video counterpart, each object melts into the next in a hypnotic loop.
Also experimenting at the intersection of art and science, Stephen Bruce creates his acid paintings by using patinas on copper surfaces, chemically transforming the metal into color, pattern and movement. Bruce allows the mutable qualities of fluidity and flow to direct the process, with his observation of nature as a guiding force in his composition. The abstract paintings reference seascapes, estuaries, horizon lines, geological formations and aerial views of landscape.
Behind the visual allure and apparent serenity of these works lies an unsettling metaphor for change. Whether through objects that occupy the liminal space between the organic and the synthetic, or alchemically transformed surfaces, each of these artists extends to the viewer an invitation into an uncertain future.
Tomiko Jones
Visiting Artist and Curator-in-Residence
The Arts at CIIS
Cumulus is a yearlong program that focuses on the environment through the lens of water, engaging water as metaphor, site of cultural practice, and locus of spiritual belief.