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.

Jennifer Juniper Stratford. Program Vista, 2014 (still); video projection. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo by the author.

Allison Schulnik’s EAGER is a jumble of grotesque and beautiful scenes that begins with a dance of skeletal female figures who communicate with their long, stringy hair, since their faces are absent. They come in contact with a gauzy, blue-stained witch and a comically sad clown–horse with an erect, red, swinging dick. Then one woman unzips the others’ stomachs to wear them like backpacks through a wild and carnivorous forest of flowers and trees reminiscent of the garden of live flowers from Alice in Wonderland. The influence of choreographer Pina Bausch is apparent, but so too the terrifying early psychedelic cartoons of the 1930s. What this lavish animation encompasses makes words feel ineffective, but any attempt would have to include life, death, rebirth, sex, competition, nature, self-expression, female empowerment, and reproductive power—thanks to all of the rotting, deformed, and beautifully hand-sculpted figures. Schulnik even places herself in the work in a photographic stop-motion sequence, wearing a costume that resembles the blue clay witch. This is the first animation for which the artist has commissioned accompanying music; in the past, she used existing music from artists. Schulnik says that working with Olson was her first collaboration, and the creative agency this allowed is evident in the film.

Allison Schulnik. EAGER, 2014 (video still); stop-motion animation with sound; 8:30. Courtesy of the Artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

The paintings from Los Angeles-based Jake Longstreth’s series Particulate Matter (2013–2014) are meditations on mark making and form. Using the hills surrounding Los Angeles as subject matter, Longstreth makes small, precise brush strokes to create the depth of the topography while leaving the sky a perfectly smooth gradient. Los Angeles is a city of sunlight, but if you live here, the quality of the light becomes one of the only indications of a passage of time—the color of the sky and the light reflecting off of the surrounding hills is powerful—and indicative of the season, levels of pollution, cloud cover, and moisture. Longstreth somehow, almost magically, manages to capture not only the varying qualities of light on the hills, but the feelings they invoke as you see them change daily from your house or the freeway.

Jake Longstreth. Particulate Matter #3, 2014; oil on canvas; 17 x 13 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Peter Scherrer’s expressionistic oil paintings of the California desert are rich tapestries with layers of symbols built into the landscape. Craggy mountainsides become human characters, trees turn into snakes, cacti resemble testicles—there are a lot of possible and probable hidden reproductive organs—as well as a dagger perched precariously at the edge of one painting. This landscape is a purely subconscious one, where each element has a personality and life of its own, but none of it feels sinister. Scherrer’s landscapes feel like old friends making themselves known.

Peter Scherrer. Red Hill, 2014; oil on linen on panel; 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Jesse Wiedel’s strange, somewhat crude paintings of low-life characters in small California towns are the only pieces that directly deal with civilization in the show, although the civilization depicted is a surreal fiction. In The Tropics (2014), a woman dances for a man with his pants down around his ankles outside of a motel called The Tropics while a sleepy-looking alien lumbers behind her. In The Incinerator (2013), a pair of terrifying meth-head men walk both toward and away from the viewer, carrying a red cooler under a tie-dye sky, as though they were stuck circling the sawdust incinerator in their small town for eternity. These paintings display the depression, helplessness, and total disconnect from the land that happens in small towns (note the “Tropics” motel, which is anywhere but), even though these places are often more remote and therefore enveloped in the landscape.

Jesse Wiedel. The Tropics, 2013; oil on wood; 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The links between the pieces in Landscape City are tonal more than anything else. The feelings evoked by Aaron Olson’s score for EAGER are echoed again and again in the pieces throughout the show—a calm navigation of our place in the vastness of our physical world.

Landscape City is on view at Eagle Rock Center for the Arts through December 11, 2014.