Substance in Turmoil, Flights of Mystery
by Robert C. Morgan
The art of Sheila Elias abounds with ideas and images flowering into a celebrative mode of authenticity. Her paintings and recent digital photographs sustain an ecstatic momentum through the use of evocative forms and figures that suggest conflict, balance, and intrigue. The bodily sensations revealed in her paintings and photographs moving through a weirdly tenuous pictorial space beckon all inhabitants on planet Earth to reclaim their destiny. In recent years, Elias’ work has involved people in flight, a musical rift through time and space. Her figures fall out of blue skies or skirt beside one another, fraught with emotion, often in a relaxed state of abandonment unencumbered by gravity. Her complex digital images escape the realm of the rational. They hark back as much to Berlin Dada as to a quixotic style of figurative expressionism. They hold fast to an apocalyptic aesthetic demeanor and a vernacular sense of being.
Elias goes to the core of the human condition – especially as we envision it for the future. She intervenes with a clear-cut technical bravura into our ever-expanding, cyberspatial network of fugitive souls, a virtual space where nothing appears certain. Stability has transmuted into an untenable techno-universe where we struggle against the perennial deceptions of an omniscient and uncanny hyperreality. Everything appears in a nexus of indeterminate fluctuation. We are rendered gliding, gilded specimens of humanity struggling to experience encounters that enable us to live as creative beings in a highly politicized world.
As an artist, Sheila Elias’ task is not a simple one. There is nothing lost or forsaken in her art. Recent large-scale digital prints such as Smoke Dancer (2005) and Sky Painter (2006) challenge the very core of human reality and reinterpret our thinking about global trends into something beyond the predictable. In each case beauty combines with deep irony. Elias always regards destruction and redemption with a cautious distance that recalls the “science of beauty” Croce proposed at the outset of Modernism. Her images of flight begin on the surface and then proceed inward. Her photographs herald a certain innocence, a coy pathos, yet retain something of the heroic gesture.
Elias works within the magnitude of poetic gravity, giving an uncanny tempo to her images through sheer rhythmic persistence. In a remarkable print entitled Trees (2004), the dark and light color modulations of the trees in the foreground are restrained by a spectrum of sensory luminosity as in the background the destruction of high-rise buildings leaves us uncertain and breathless. It would appear that the limits of the meaning in existence – and perhaps existence itself – were being played out before our eyes.
But these modulations of color and light are not only formal conditions. They speak of the recent past and the present. They also point in the direction of devolution away from progress. If technology is neutral in relation to the human instincts that employ it, as Witold Rybcynski argued twenty-five years ago, then progress remains a subjective concept more than an objective one. Here I recall two paintings by Elias, titled Freedom (2002) and Frenzy (2005). In both cases the painted figurations have a threatening aspect, suggesting a disjuncture in time, a restlessness and tumultuousness beyond normal expectations. For Americans, this kind of anxiety was intensified by the attack on the World Trade Towers in Manhattan in 2001. The pitch of anxiety rose and then became sublimated, contributing to a social pathos in the minds not only of New Yorkers, but of urban dwellers in general. One cannot easily deny these influences, even as we pass from one decade to another or from one administration toward another, no matter how much more hopeful.
I am interested in the title “Somewhere-Anywhere” as a premeditated way of thinking about an exhibition by Sheila Elias. I am reminded of the conceptualist Joseph Kosuth’s 1967 series of works called “Art as Idea As Idea,” in which he printed blown-up Photostats from Webster’s dictionary defining various words. One such Photostat defined the word “something.” Another defined the word “nothing,” suggesting that the notion of art can be “something” and at the same time, “nothing.” I find an equally profound word play in the title of Sheila Elias, indicating that her figurations and landscapes can exist in that complex geography of the mind, that transient zone, between ”somewhere” and “nowhere.” These bifurcated terms might just as well conflate into a single term, a paradoxical term, as Elias has done. Rather than “somewhere” and “anywhere,” Elias declares the condition of her work “somewhere-anywhere.” In doing so, she suggests being in a place that is no place, or that is every place. Such a phenomenon is related to the postmodern condition – not in theory but in fact. The fragmentation of cities, the destabilization of urban neighborhoods, and the standardization of daily life imposed by propaganda designed as “information” are the rules of the day.
What is happening in the urban areas of Miami, where Elias works, is also happening in areas around New York, Teheran, Detroit, Potsdam, and Buenos Aires – not to mention in the poverty-stricken areas of West and South Africa and the war-torn areas of the Middle East. Piles of rubble juxtaposed with towering shards of glittering glass and steel not only manifest a violent contrast but are somehow absorbed into human consciousness. Elias’ performance/installations such as Homage to the Street People (1981), engaging Skid Row residents in Los Angeles, or Homeless Powerless (1994), where she contrasts the “have-nots” with the “privileged” near Miami, testify to the artist’s awakening to the culture and politics around her. Whether in her Mythological Series, San Pedro Street works, Cosmic Struggles, or Odysseys, Elias offers less an antidote to than a cry of alarm at what is post-human in the world today, a resonance that goes far beyond the narcissistic reverie of much advanced art in the early twenty-first century.
In her recent digital photographs, Elias assesses the urban dilemma facing global culture with harrowing images such as Liquid Mercury (2005), Wreck II (2004), and Shattered (2007). There is no retreat from these images. They not only “get in your face” but offer a conflicted intellectual aspect as well. In Shattered, the interior of a house has been burned or bombed. A feeling of utter displacement emerges as one scans the surface of the photograph for clues that may signify a human presence. Inserted within this black and white image of an exploded interior is another image, in color, a horizontal view of a beach scene at sunset. The semiotic opposition is impossible to reconcile. We sense the foreboding appearance of the interior room as we scan the image. Everything is scorched and ruined, blotted out in an instant. The beach scene has no place here. This contrast suggests an aspect of postmodern theory that is often ignored in terms of its application to quotidian reality, namely the suspension of opposition without resolution. In Shattered there is indeed no resolution, only the suspension of opposition. Does this relieve the tormented viewer of having to come to terms with the situation? Most likely not. However, if we acknowledge Elias’ statement that she is attempting to portray “raw emotions and harsh realities tempered with gentle optimism and beauty,” we begin to unravel the significance of this altered photograph. Just as Picasso painted a flower over the hand of a dead warrior holding a broken sword near the bottom edge of Guernica, so Elias introduces a message of hope that elides the tragedy of the present. History is still a reality, and nothing stays the same. As the Tao te Ching says, even in pitch darkness there is a new source of light.
Elias’ work is distinguished by its breadth and integrity, diversity and intimacy, offerings of grandeur and metaphors of intimacy. Within visionary series such as “Myths and Offerings” (1988-89), “Secret Gardens,” or “Tondos Rondos” (1997-99), she posits conflicting elements and figurations that tell a story through heightened forms of sensory involvement. These stories may confound the typical narrative employed by photographers. Elias’ images move beyond the normative structure of academic political art into a more personal artistic dialogue with poverty, war, repression, and other atrocities of our present world, yet, at the same time, they manage to evoke a subtle and celebrative form of lost innocence. This is made evident in her marvelous American Icons or paintings such as Superhero (2004), and Aida (2007), where Elias paints gyrating acrobatic figures boldly but not without subtle equivocations verging on humor and pathos.
Pervading Elias’ recent paintings is a kind of Pop expressionism that implies perpetual motion. Although the expressionist impulse is often regarded in opposition to Pop, Elias has managed to envision a synthesis between the two. This would be found in such paintings as Angles of Desire (2002), Freedom (2002), and Merriments (2004), where figures leap and twist in open space. Male and female acrobatic figures are suspended in a transitory moment, evolving and transmuting through angst-ridden, evocative twists and turns. This long-standing synthesis of Pop and expressionist styles also extends into the recent tondos, such as Aida I and II. The deliberate awkwardness of the striding figures overrides any pretense of classical form in favor of the romantic gesture. We see this demeanor in much of Elias’ work, particularly in the paintings of the past two decades. This suggests an ineluctable romanticism, a spirit of joie de vive that echoes throughout the extreme oppositions of emotion one finds in her work.
Fantasy is clearly one aspect of the Elias’ paintings that cannot be easily ignored. It has played an important role in much of Modernist painting. Fantasy pervades the work of Miro and Masson, Ernst and Dali, Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois. Whether or not it is recognized on the conscious level of human experience is another story. Often we praise artists who alleviate the burden of repression through fanciful images that emerge seemingly without effort from the unconscious. Given the condition of our mediated global environment, we cannot avoid the saturation of advertising and entertainment, a saturation that constantly distracts us from rational thought and leads us back to Lacan’s “mirror stage” where fantasy and narcissism assume control over our lives. Even so, not all fantasy is negative. As Erich Fromm argued in one of his later reevaluations of Freud, there are occasions when fantasies may prove necessary for survival. What Elias appears to understand, as her paintings so often reveal, is that fantasy bears a certain richness in relation to life, even an elegance with regard to our personal and social engagements with one another, regardless of culture or period in the course of human history.
Sheila Elias creates a world that is not only subject to fantasy, but in many ways becomes the subject of fantasy. In the tondo Liberte (2005) there are three figures at play. The context is never certain, but the figures are related in space. Perhaps they are engaged in a dance, or something sexual. It is difficult to know, but its dreamlike quality is not entirely outside of this world. In a rondo titled Inner Reality (2005), many more figures are held together formally through the abandonment of color and contour. Fantasy – like ecstasy – carries a sense of Dionysian abandon, and this painting is exuberant in this regard. It could be a circus, perhaps in ancient Egypt. The group of figures in the lower right standing on their heads appear oblivious to the acrobats and trapeze artists flying around them. The ringmaster seems obsessed with his own act while everything else happens without score or script. Ecstatic happiness fills this painting, close to Matisse. It is an airy painting. It breathes new light and a richness of spirit. Then, in an earlier painting called Dream Visions (1993), we see the imagination at work in another way, also related to Matisse. The table has a large apple across from the contour of a cup. The drapery and the tablecloth somehow intersect. There is a view of mountains and a cloud. Maybe the cloud is a tree. It is gorgeous nonetheless. The crockery to the right side is a pure artistic vision. Everything is intuitively there, yet in its rightful place.
Elias keeps progressing, moving forward. She has a considerable breadth. If the world is in turmoil around her, then she requires the fantasy of flight, the ability to discharge rage against a society that gone awry. She is angry that the world around her exhausted itself at the moment that energy should be flowing the other way. There are few artists that really look for a better world, who really mean to create a vision of a new world unfettered by the past, a world unburdened by the fierce innocence that artists in the early days of Modernism were too eager to embrace. In such a climate, it would appear that Sheila Elias has found a path of her own – sometimes a one-lane road, sometimes a boulevard, sometimes an expressway. Whatever size the path takes, Elias is right there traveling down its course,
going strong.
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Robert C. Morgan is an international critic, artist, curator, and lecturer who lives and works primarily in New York City. As a Contributing Editor to Sculpture Magazine, Professor Morgan is focused on the problems of the artist in an era of global change. In 1999, he received the first Arcale award in Art Criticism from the Municipality in Salamanca (Spain). In 2005, he was awarded a Fulbright senior scholar award to do research on the traditional arts and their influence on the Korean avant-garde. He holds both an advanced degree in sculpture and a doctorate in contemporary art history, and currently lectures at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York. In addition to his many books and essays (with translations in 16 languages), Professor Morgan has curated over 60 exhibitions, and shows his own work regularly.
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