Jake Longstreth. Free Range, 2014; oil on canvas in artist frame; 60 x 40 in.

For urban dwellers with the means and motivation to leave the city in search of open space, there is a crucial moment when the last big-box store fades in the rear-view mirror and the mountains loom ahead. LA-based artist Jake Longstreth’s humble paintings featured in Free Range at Gregory Lind Gallery present the viewer with a likewise ambivalent moment when the promise of freedom becomes tinged with a nagging, indefinite apprehension.

Longstreth’s landscape paintings depict distant mountain ranges under vast skies, but they deal not so much with nature as with the concept of the sublime. A low-grade, unspoken dread is present in all nine of his paintings, which range in scale from intimate to body-sized. It is crucial to understand that the artist elected to paint from memory, which gives his imagination free rein—yet the works are restrained in composition, facture, and palette. It is precisely the use of an understated palette, especially in the skies where greenish grays and hazy pinks blend to dead blues in seamless gradations, that gives viewers the creeping sense that we are not experiencing the respite from the city that was promised. Rather, we experience nature’s inability to reveal anything to us other than what we project onto it.

Another way that Longstreth evokes the sublime is through his use of light. It recalls the work of 19th-century American Luminist painters such as Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade. As Barbara Novak puts it: “In the smaller luminist paintings … light, because of its silent, unstirring energy, causes the universe, as Emerson would have it, to become ‘transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own’ to shine through it.”[1] The light in Longstreth’s work, however, is subtly filtered through smog, dust, and wildfire smoke; it allows the viewers, in a surprisingly non-prescriptive way, to come to terms with the universe we’ve created, one whose “higher laws” are really just the consequences of our own actions.

Longstreth’s paintings successfully provide a moment of honest contemplation. It’s a silent moment, when one’s internal drama can coalesce with the knowledge of inescapable change—rising temperatures, mega-drought, year-round wildfire seasons, and diminishing air quality. We know all of these things to be true, yet we are compelled to drive out to the mountains, over and over again.

[1] Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press), 43.

Miguel Arzabe is a Bay Area-based visual artist working with painting and video. He has a degree in Environmental Fluid Dynamics and is an experienced outdoorsman.

Richard Baker Howl, 2010 Gouache on paper 12 x 10.5 in. Courtesy of Gregory Lind Gallery.

As contemporary life embraces digital formats as a means of convenience, analog devices have become more and more scarce in contemporary society. Record albums have all but disappeared for mp3’s, newspapers for blogs (such as DailyServing) and printed books for Kindles and iPads. While there is a growing demand for these analog items for the nostalgic, these physical objects are equally fetishizied as they diminish as part of our everyday life. I’m a sucker for a good artist monograph, and I have a several bulging bookshelves to prove it. I seem to constantly remind myself not to fall victim to attractive packaging and always to evaluate the contents of a given publication over how well made or designed it may be.

Currently on view at Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco are two artists that use the physicality of the book as a subject, both in image and as object. Tom Burckhardt has collected the front and back covers of various found books, intermingling the book covers existing markings with formally constructed painting. The coexistence of the books physicality along with Burckhardt’s own marking collapses our expectations of these objects as books, liberating the materials from their utilitarian function, and binding them to the world of formal abstraction.

Tom Burckhardt Rampart St., 2010 Colored pencil & acrylic on book cover 8 x 10.5 in. Courtesy of Gregory Lind Gallery.

Richard Baker, approaches the notion of the book through representation, painstakingly rendering all of his subject’s physical details. Literary masters from the 1950s through the 70s, many having worked in San Francisco where this exhibition takes place, such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, sit along side books that reference the art world, such as the book A, written by Andy Warhol. For Baker, the books rendered mark important moments of recent social history, blending the nostalgia for these books as items of historical markings with the art object.

While each of these artists turn their attention to books as objects and images in very different ways, the feeling of longing for the physical, analog quality of material is present. In many ways, the works on view transcend the subject referenced or the material sourced, binding the viewer to our wavering relationship to these physical objects.

Installation view. Courtesy of Gregory Lind Gallery.