[O Sweet Spontaneous] Earth

Angela Chen Javier Arce Martin Schwenk

"[O sweet spontaneous]

earth how often have

the

doting

fingers of

prurient philosophers pinched

and

poked"

—E.E. Cummings

This poem by American poet E.E. Cummings touches on the way that science, philosophers, and the religious poke, prod, and squeeze the earth, looking for some kind of reason that they all exist. As critics of their contemporary society, Emerson and Thoreau urged that each person find, in Emerson’s words, “an original relation to the universe”; they themselves sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in their writing by emphasizing on the transcendentalist idea of human harmony with nature.

The pull towards embracing the natural world is ever present in the work of Javier Arce. His past series have explored themes of individuality, freedom, and the rejection of the trappings of industry. Here we are greeted with bucolic landscapes, seemingly simple yet he locates new ways to inhabit natural spaces. He applies the idea of a ‘plantlike existence’ modeled after Michael Marder, embracing temporality, freedom, material knowledge, wisdom, and transformation, much like the inherent characteristics of a garden. The artist depicts colorful and vivid landscapes of plant and tree species, wildflowers in bloom, and inflorescent flowers bursting forth, expressing movement.

Angela Chen’s work is a record of the artist’s engagement with the plants, animals, insects, and matter in a particular place. Her Fingereyes series, named for Eva Hayward’s formulation of fingeryeyes, a haptic-optic observational methodology for viewing/ touching/ sensing/ feeling cross-species encounters, challenges her viewer to alter their approach to digital images. Chen seeks to slow down this process by printing photographs on sheets of fabric which are further processed with embroidery, beadwork, or stitching, creating a tactile experience while also highlighting natural and unnatural cycles. Her most recent work Touch Screen Sensitivity is a series of standalone cyanotypes of the sunshine mimosa, native to Texas, and interwoven with short text fragments about a childhood desire to meet a weed from Taiwan, the Mimosa pudica, or sensitive plant.

While most artists approach nature in broad strokes, Martin Schwenk’s mission is to highlight each aspect of the landscape individually, giving every bud, leaf, and stem their due. In the sciences, the application of methodological reductionism attempts explanation of entire systems in terms of their individual, constituent parts and their interactions. The transition from these miracles to the works of art was indeed understood as osmotic. With a vocabulary of man-made materials, Schwenk manages to create a kind of sculptural calligraphy in Plexiglas and plaster. These materials not only give the work their fragile character, but also points to the transition, which is justified both by the history of the ornament and by the sculptural work of Schwenk himself. "Once nature is conceived in its transformations, it becomes easy to bring it artificially to the place where it once happened to be accidentally lost; , As a deviation paves the way for many.“