ALYSSA FANNING: A Thousand Moons and Suns

ALYSSA FANNING

ALYSSA FANNING

ALYSSA FANNING A THOUSAND MOONS AND SUNS

ALYSSA FANNING’S RAVISHING DEVASTATIONS

PATRICK NEAL

IN THE BEGINNING, 2012 21. Graphite on paper, 11 x 11 inches

ALYSSA FANNING’S RAVISHING DEVASTATIONS PATRICK NEAL

When I rst saw the artist Alyssa Fanning’s linoleum prints and oil paintings depicting demolition and littered industrial sites around her neighborhood close to New Jersey’s Van Buskirk Island and the Hackensack River, they immediately brought to mind the empty lots and urban decay bordering my own neighborhood of Long Island City, Queens.

Van Buskirk Island is a site not far from Fanning’s home, a landscape that has been the subject of and given sustenance to her prints, drawings and paintings for many years. e Island, which is surrounded by the Hackensack River, houses a 19th century water puri cation plant that was abandoned a er a merger and acquisition in the 1980’s with company United Waters, later Suez North America. is arti cially created island has been home to a diverse ecosystem of plants and animals, and was recently, designated an endangered historic site. It has served as a crossroads and place of contemplation that exempli es the collision course between nature’s bounty and man-made intrusion. A rare natural sanctuary and cultural institution, situated in a community surrounded by over development and a ected by Globalization and Climate Change.

During 2011 and 2012 both Fanning’s and my own neighborhood, were devastated by hurricanes Irene and Sandy. Fanning used photo documentation to observe ooding that washed detritus and debris into orderly suburban streets, and created imagery depicting trash commingling with the symmetric grids of her neighborhood. In my own community, waters breached the banks of the East River and ooded residential lobbies and subways. Addressing these myriad disasters at the time, Fanning remarked, “Devastation on the Hackensack is but a microcosm of a larger state of devastation. ere are systems within systems in its watershed and it is just one system in the larger scope of ecology.”

e physical and psychological e ects of natural and man-made disasters is the subject of Fanning’s work. And, the depth with which she explores this theme is brought to life through a range of drawings currently on view in A ousand Moons and Suns, her new exhibition at Platform Project Space. e exhibition comprises two related series; Polymorphic Disasters of the Mind and the subsequent A er the Disaster.

Mankind’s role as a super-predator and exacerbater of Climate Change is ironically contributing to the demise of the human species itself. ere is much literature on the subject, whether told through fact or ction, that depicts humanity’s hand in altering the planet and an inevitable Sixth Great Extinction. Examples include the dystopic novel e Road as envisioned by writer Cormac McCarthy, or the climate scientist Guy McPherson’s dire warnings in his book Going Dark, or maybe journalist Chris Hedges many observations on the collapse of civilizations.

Fanning’s works on paper of graphite and colored pencil could be added to this list of prophetic artworks. Her compositions embed the e ects and a ermath of disaster into intricately fashioned web-like com positions that take into consideration the domino e ects of systems breaking down. Considering such disturbing and epic subject matter, one might expect grandiose statements from an artist pondering the magnitude of such themes. Instead, Fanning has developed her own distinct vocabulary and processes for conveying disaster that is modest and sober, done in a way that is highly personal and surprisingly original. As a graphic artist, working mostly on a very small scale, Fanning makes drawings that are astonishingly detailed, delicate and layered. Her compositions are abstract, seemingly innocuous with motifs that can be decorative and pop such as rosettes and roundels, but it’s not immediately apparent what sources they are derived from. ey manage to fold incident upon incident, micro and macroscopic terrain, and temporal experience into remarkably intimate spaces while remaining symphonic in scope.

Fanning has spoken about the evolving process of dra smanship that has deepened and informed her work. Her earlier prints were inspired by the photos she took, the ne details of black and white photography simpli ed into the negative/positive, at shapes of pressed ink on paper, a sort of “reverse photojournal ism”, where newer technology informs an older medium. ese earlier works are more straight-forwardly representational, with a stabilizing horizon line to orient the landscapes. But, Fanning was soon creating collaged, cut paper maquettes from her own photos, as well as others appropriated from news sources, and she has since referenced these constructions in order to atten and compress space into more abstract and haphazard compositions. en, in the a ermath of hurricanes Irene and Sandy, followed by several other storms and power outages in her region, she found herself working by candlelight which proved to be a revelation and turning point. e glowing ame of the candle creating shadow play on Fanning’s ma quettes, di using solid forms with atmosphere, and adding another tool to her kit with which to upturn gure/ground relationships. Her graphite on paper drawing, Trails, 2011, exempli es this milestone in her work, and points the way forward informing the more recent works in A ousand Moons and Suns.

“I build compositions through a polymorphous logic combining collaged elements, shadow traceries

projected from maquettes, and imagination”, Fanning has remarked on her process. Works at Platform Project Space span the years 2012 through 2021 and it is interesting to see how the studio strategies are translated into two-dimensional forms. Although she is not working sculpturally, the motifs and designs Fanning employs, which include frames within frames, concentric circles, measurement strips and scat tered mists of tonality, are on par with Earth Artists from recent and past decades. She shares an interest in forms that solidify and dematerialize, chaos pitted against control, geometry and structure versus atmo sphere and dissolution. I’m reminded of Robert Smithson’s gravelly Mirror Displacements, the dunes and deserts coexisting with Nancy Holt’s concrete Sun Tunnels, Gordon Matta-Clark’s cut and deconstructed houses, and Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral formations with leaves, sticks and snow. Perhaps, more than the others, Fanning shares the ethical concerns and philosophical conceits of Smithson, when considering the hubris and absurdity of man’s e orts juxtaposed against the brute force of nature. ey both also share a fascination with non-sites, in-between places that exist somewhere between birth and decay.

ese dichotomies are exempli ed in Fanning’s drawing Roundel, Melting, 2012, which is only nine by six inches and covered in surface activity. A central circular formation of spirals within spirals reverberates out, like water rippling on a lake, and is framed within a spatially ambiguous window. A cloud of sooty ash looms in from the le side, suggestive of a bombing or con agration. A so halo of celestial and dappled light peeks through the stratosphere, possibly in the a ermath of a sonic boom or atomic blast, as the bot tom section is littered with jagged debris and demolition. e variety of mark-making Fanning conjures up to achieve these e ects, which manage to be both peaceful and apocalyptic, is breathtaking.

At a certain point, Fanning began to consider aspects of her work existing as “disasters of the mind”, as she has increasingly relied on her own imagination to generate imagery. As her work developed, the range of other artists from whom she learned is eclectic and vast. For compositional and structural clues she turned to Indian and Persian miniatures and Piranesi’s series of Imaginary Prisons, as well as the spheres and zones of space in Botticelli’s drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy. She has looked at the mark-making strategies of other artists, only to resonate psychically with their mindsets as they explored both dark and ecstatic themes. Examples include the gural and land formations in Goya’s Disasters of War series, and the quirky and expressive glyphs and extended parameters seen in Charles Burch eld’s natural outdoor scenes. In other cases, excursions to museums has been fortuitous to Fanning, as when she saw the daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey with their clear blue light, or the hidden details in paintings by Mexican artists Miguel Cabrera and Juan Rodriguez Juarez. Fanning’s curiosity to seek out inspiration from past masters is only matched by the degree with which she explores perceptual terrain in order to push the plastic possibilities of her drawings.

It’s important to take note of the word “a er” in the title of Fanning’s recent and ongoing series, A er the Disaster. Her body of work has always had an awe-inspiring focus on the strength and fragility of the natural world, and a er points toward a hopeful place, much like a peaceful Arcadia distanced from the meddling of the human species. Around 2017, Fanning introduced color into her work with colored pencil compositions that are declarative and bold, and reintroduced the simplicity of the horizon line. An exam ple of this is Charlie’s Summer, 2020, one of the larger drawings in the show with a minimal palette of cool grays and electric chartreuse, that enlivens an all over sca olding of architecture and greenery resembling the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Here, the picture plane reads like a vertical living plant wall teeming with vegetation, or a vast topographic map covering hundreds of miles. Although the piece is entirely improvi sational and imagined, the work is informed by Fanning’s impressive trove of art history and eagle eye for perceptual phenomena. Charlie’s Summer, just like the exhibition’s poetic title, A ousand Moons and Suns is indicative of the passage of generations and civilizations occupying the terrain of an Earth and Cosmos that continually refashions and asserts itself.

PATRICK NEAL is a painter, curator, and arts writer. He is a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Painting and a contributor to Hyperallergic and Two Coats of Paint. Neal’s recent solo exhibitions include Winter Was Hard, at Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, April-May 2021 and Peyrelebade at Smith College, Oresman Gallery, Northampton, MA, during October 2019.

DARK SOUND, 2016. Graphite on paper, 6 x 9 inches

SHADOW ROSETTE ON THE FACE OF THE MOON, 2012 2018. Graphite on paper, 11 x 11 inches

SHADOW ROSETTE, 2012. Graphite pencil on paper, 5 x 3 inches

ROUNDEL, MELTING, 2012. Graphite on pieced paper, 9 x 6 inches

ROUND MIDNIGHT, 2019. C olored pencil on paper, 12 x 16 inches

MOUNTAIN BLUEBIRD, 2019. Colored pencil on paper, 12 x 16 inches

TRAILS: MOCKINGBIRD IN THE TULIP TREE, 2020 2021. Graphite on paper, 7.5 x 10 inches

CHARLIE’S SUMMER, 2019-2020. Graphite on paper, 12 x 16 inches

ECLIPSE OVER THE HACKENSACK, 2016 2021. Graphite on paper, 16 x 20 inches

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5, Detail, ECLIPSE OVER THE HACKENSACK 9, Detail, IN THE BEGINNING 12, Detail, IN THE BEGINNING 14-15, DID THE SKY TUMBLE AND FALL?, 2012-21. 14.5 x 10 inches 22-23, DELICATE TROUBLE, 2013. Graphite on paper, 5 x 3 inches 30-31, Detail, ROUNDEL, MELTING 32, GRAY TRAILS, 2016. Graphite on paper, 12 x 9 inches 33, Detail, GRAY TRAILS 38-39, Detail, MOUNTAIN BLUEBIRD 42-43, Detail, TRAILS: MOCKINGBIRD IN THE TULIP TREE 46-47, Detail, CHARLIE’S SUMMER

48, Detail, AFTER GOYA’S DISASTERS OF WAR 49, AFTER GOYA’S DISASTERS OF WAR, 2013. Graphite on paper, 2.75 x 4.75 inches 52-53, Detail, ECLIPSE OVER THE HACKENSACK 54, Detail, CHARLIE’S SUMMER

57, Detail, ECLIPSE OVER THE HACKENSACK

ALYSSA FANNING

ALYSSA FANNING’S WORK focuses on the strength and fragility of the natural world. With a back ground in painting and printmaking, Fanning is best known for her drawings, which are highly detailed and mostly small in scale. e intimate works invite close viewing that reveals miniature worlds, illumi nating the connection between the microscopic and macroscopic. Delicately rendered through a labor-in tensive process, the compositions are meditations on time and inner projections of both the disasters and triumphs of imagined land and mind scapes – personal, cultural and ecological in scope.

Fanning was born in Teaneck, NJ. A graduate of Pratt Institute (BFA) and Montclair State University (MFA), Fanning has exhibited at AC Institute, New York, NY; the Glass House, New Canaan, CT; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; and Geo rey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA, among others. Her curatorial projects include exhibitions at ABC No Rio, New York, NY; Eagle Studio, Brooklyn, NY; Radiator Gallery, Queens, NY. e artist has been published in BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint and most recently in the book Uni-Verse: Poetry – Prints – Proofs by Visionary Humans published by Battery Journal.

Alyssa Fanning lives and works in northern New Jersey.

ALYSSA FANNING

A THOUSAND MOONS AND SUNS

Platform Project Space, June 5 - July 3, 2021

ESSAY: Patrick Neal

DESIGN: Alyssa Fanning

PHOTOGRAPHY: Emma Fanning

INSTALLATION: Michael Lee

PLATFORM PROJECT SPACE