Recently, a kind of startlingly poetic language has crept into the titles of exhibitions in the alternative art scene. Although this sometimes suggests a P.T. Barnum-esque exercise in seducing the art-viewing public into coming into for a look-see, these enigmatically flowery phrases can actually help us to understand what the work is about, in the way a poem's title can be a serious clue to its meaning.
Song of Land and Skin is the provocative name of Show and Tell Gallery's recent pairing of Francesca Sunsten's paintings with Lukas Felzmann's installation of photographs and sculptures. On the simplest level both artists are creating invented situations in and on the surface (the skin) of the landscape. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that in the work of these two, skin can also be read as technique: that membrane of artifice that separates and protects art and artists from the world.
In Felzmann's large (50x60inches) photographs of found or invented tableaux in dry, deserted landscapes, this skin of considerable technical skill is stretched until it becomes transparent. What is striking about these beautifully composed and printed black and white images is not how well they are made but their unselfconscious calmness and intelligence.
Like Richard Long, Felzmann builds simple constructions of plain materials in the middle of nowhere and photographs them. Unlike Long's pieces however, which suggest the semi-permanent religious monuments of some ancient civilization, Felzmann's delicate, ephemeral sculptures are more about the ambiguity of scale and distance inherent to their desert settings. In Labyrinth (Sticks and String), an angular maze of string winds through twigs anchored in a web-cracked basin of dried mud. In the clear, dry light, the shadow of the cord is more tangible than the dusty string itself. In this barren landscape there is no reference to indicate scale. We have no way of knowing that this whole construction is actually only a few inches across.
Felzmann's interest in the evanescence of the human mark is even more apparent in his pictures of crumbling asphalt roadbeds washed out by flash floods, their edges falling away like braking cake. Although these highways give the viewer a clearer sense of scale than Felzmann's shapes of twigs and stones, they hint just as strongly about the fleeting nature of our presence in the landscape. These allusions to the powerful destructive forces of nature and time are also present in Felzmann's installation of flinty pointed football-sized rocks strung from the gallery ceiling. Hung just above head height, these oversized arrowheads are connected, like the twigs in the photographs, by a maze of string. Dents in the floor beneath some of them uncomfortably suggest the potentially violent forces of tome and gravity. Standing beneath them, I uneasily consider once again the question of just what "life-size" means, since, unlike the stones used in the desert scenes, these dangerous-looking rocks are considerably bigger than a breadbox. Despite its dry simplicity, all of Felzmann's work embodies the kind of Germanic romanticism seen in the paintings of C.D. Friedrich, in which the fugitive presence of human influence is often symbolized by crumbling ruins.