ILANA MANOLSON
Time: In the Mountains
ILANA MANOLSON: THOUGHTS ACROSS TIME AND PLACE
by Lawrence R. RinderIlana Manolson’s landscape paintings emerge from her own direct, almost daily experience of nature and her reflections on time and place. The landscapes in this exhibition are inspired by the Canadian Rockies in the vicinity of Lake
O’Hara. One can identify in several of them the distinctive angular escarpments of this mountain range in southern British Columbia. Her paintings capture the tumultuous energy of this place in the disparate timeframes of water and stone. By collapsing these two registers of time, the artist elicits a philosophical sense of the underlying flux of being. She paints not en plein air, but in her studio, drawing on memories of what she has seen and—in some cases—imagined.
Manolson’s art is resonant with work by several contemporary artists including Julie Mehretu and Mathew Ritchie, both of whom straddle the history of art (abstract expressionism in particular), science, and personal narrative. Underlying their approach, and Manolson’s, is a deep current of Romanticism with the sublime, visionary landscapes of J.W.M Turner providing a rich precedent for explosive compositions that collapse time and space. Manolson’s work, however, has even stronger connections to Chinese landscape painters of a thousand years ago, in whose work one finds a strikingly similar approach to the interweaving of perceptions of nature, subjective response, and the expression of a particular philosophy of being.
In her painting Pattern of Place Manolson suggests that water, earth, fire, and air co-exist and align according to an underlying, fundamental pattern. The elements of the landscape—mountains, sky, river—interlock like puzzle pieces. The push-and-pull of forces is dynamic—even violent—and yet simultaneously harmonious, creating an equilibrium of motion and stasis, heat and cold. The symbolism of this approach suggests the neo-Confucian ideals that underlay Chinese painting of the Song dynasty (960 – 1279 CE). Yet, Manolson’s symbolic frame of reference is less social and political (as it was for many of the Song artists) than scientific. Pattern of Place draws on a vast body of knowledge—from the theory of evolution to the field of geomorphology—that was unavailable to artists a thousand years ago.
Shumann Resonance 30” x 364.5”
Acrylic on Yupo
In her most monumental work in this exhibition, the fifty-six-foot long scroll painting, Schumann Resonance, Manolson creates a complex evocation of dynamic flux. Here, our perspective appears to veer from extreme close up to distant view while the landscape elements themselves coalesce and explode in a rhythmic pulse. The title alludes to a recently observed phenomenon in the extreme low frequency range of the Earth’s electromagnetic field. The so-called “Schumann Resonance”— subtle and invisible though it may be— impacts global conditions from lightning to earthquakes. While pointing towards this scientific discovery, Manolson also stands on the ancient foundation of Chinese shan shui, or “mountain and water,” painting.
With origins dating as far back as the 5th century, shan shui became the foremost
mode of Chinese landscape painting during the Tang dynasty (618 – 907 CE). The variations on this mode, which carries on to this day, are innumerable; yet, at least one painting from the Tang period, Li Zhaodao’s Emperor Ming Huang’s Journey into Shu (ca. 800 CE) shows a number of similarities with Schumann Resonance. 1 First, the epic scale of the landscape which, in both paintings, exceeds in scope and detail what a person could possibly observe in a single instant of observation. Both paintings suggest composites of multiple views as well as scenes recalled in memory or imagination.
Li and Manolson both use the landscape as a vehicle to capture the passage of time: in Li’s painting, the Emperor and his retinue snake through the mountains almost cinematically while in Manolson’s
1. While it is now widely believed that the extant painting is an 11th or 12th century copy of Li’s original, it is nevertheless a masterpiece and illuminates the general approach of the Tang dynasty painter.
painting it is the flow of water across the scene that conveys the rush of time. Lastly, the distinctive blue and green pigments of Li’s painting are echoed in the mineral colors of Manolson’s palette. Another feature of Schumann Resonance that echoes Chinese painting generally is the extremely long scroll-like format. At least since the 3rd century Chinese artists had been making paintings on scrolls that were partially unrolled, by hand, at the time of viewing. One of the most well-known examples of this mode is Wu Wei’s Ten Thousand Miles of the Yangtze River (1505 CE), a painting which has many formal and thematic similarities with Manolson’s Schumann Resonance.
For Manolson, one vector of experience is the passage of time while another is the oscillation between close-up and cosmic space. This is the explicit subject of her painting, The Monumental and the Molecular. In this work, we experience a vertiginous sweep from a microscopic view of the ground at our feet to a scene of far off mountains. By leaving nearly half of the surface blank, however, Manolson seems to indicate that the drama of space and time is little more than an evanescent illusion that exists against a backdrop of fundamental emptiness. The artist employs a similar compositional approach in What We Preserve where a diagonal swath of landscape
is bounded by areas of blank, white yupo paper. Akin to a Taoist idea of a nameless essence or the Zen concept of mu, this reference to the unknowability of the real is one of the key artistic tropes of the Southern Song era. In works by Ma Yuan (1160 – 1225 CE) for example, one often finds large areas of the composition left unpainted. Interestingly, this same artist made some of the most scientific works in the history of Chinese painting, a set of eleven or twelve paintings representing properties of water under various conditions. In the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing, Ma Yuan’s water series anticipates by almost a thousand years Manolson’s closely observed renderings of water as it flows, cataracts, and reflects.
Manolson’s The Giants We Stand With, includes just such a compendium of watery variety. While the title seems to refer to the “gigantic” mountains that we see silhouetted against the horizon, the stable experience of “standing” also alluded to in the title is belied by the extraordinary flux above and below the ghostly peaks. A number of Chinese paintings, such as Luo Zhichuan’s
Jackdaws in Old Trees (early 14th century), employ the same technique as Manolson does here of setting light-toned mountains against a dark sky, either to indicate an evening scene or to suggest the presence of snow. Yet this approach is relatively rare in Chinese painting, perhaps because the suggestion of the mountain’s ephemerality is contrary to the traditional symbolism of the mountain as an embodiment of the eternal. Manolson’s History Held Between Stone and Water also shows white mountains silhouetted against the dark, even as their reflection in the lake below suggests a day-time view. This diurnal contrast has something of a Magritte-ian paradox about it and opens the door to a perception of the scene as not so much natural as metaphysical. Indeed, the mountain scene itself—a mere vignette at the center of the painting—is encompassed by an out-scaled cosmic tumult of earth, water, and air.
The representation of nature as a dense, almost over-powering presence can be seen in the monumental, dark ink paintings
of the Northern Song era, such as Li Cheng’s Solitary Temple amid Clearing Peaks (ca. 960 CE). This painting shares certain important characteristics with several of Manolson’s paintings including Time in the Mountains in which detail piles upon detail to create a sense of layered, even congested, time and experience. Time in the Mountains goes even beyond the incredible density of Li’s painting to introduce multiple horizons and the juxtaposition of painted and photographic imagery that further complicates the simple experience of seeing.
Although her paintings derive from her own experience, close looking, and memory, Ilana Manolson’s works reveal powerful connections to the visual and philosophical explorations of Chinese artists of a thousand years ago. Perhaps this is less a testament to the resilience of artistic style than it is a consequence of the permanence of nature’s mysteries.
by Lawrence R. Rinder Director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Former Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American ArtAcrylic on Yupo
Shumann Resonance 2
30” x 255”
Acrylic on Yupo
Luminous Shadow
48” x 74”
Acrylic on Yupo
Rooted 27” x 27”
Acrylic on Yupo
The Monumental And The Molecular 30” x 79.5”
Acrylic on Yupo
Indian Paintbrush 14” x 11”
Acrylic on Yupo
Ilana Manolson is a Canadian-born painter, printmaker and naturalist. She has had over 30 solo exhibitions of her work and her work has been included in over 100 group exhibitions. Her most recent one-person exhibitions were at the Jason McCoy Gallery in New York and the Cadogan Contemporary Gallery in London. Her most recent shows in Canada were at the Toronto International Arts Fair and at the Nicola Rukaj Gallery in Toronto.
Ilana was born in Calgary and grew up in Montreal. Her first job was as a naturalist in Parks Canada Western Region. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design.
In addition to the galleries mentioned above, her work has been exhibited at many galleries and museums including the Tufts University Art Gallery, the Danforth Museum of Art, the De Cordova Museum, Fuller Museum, Boston Public Library, Endicott College, Ballin Castle Museum, Regis College, Gordon College, the Clark Gallery, the Howard Yezerski Gallery, and the Galeria Espacio Abierto (Havana, Cuba). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Berkeley Museum (BAMPFA), the Danforth Museum, the De Cordova Museum, the Boston Public Library, the Ballin Castle Museum and numerous corporate collections. The Jason McCoy, the Cadogan Contemporary and the Nicola Rukaj galleries currently represent her.
She is a two-time winner of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship for Painting (2008-11 and 2018-21) and also received the St. Botolph Artist Grant. Her residencies include the Banff Centre for the Arts residency where she was twice a Leighton Fellow, Mass MOCA, the Ballinglen Arts Foundation (three times), Yaddo Artist Colony, and Banff School of Fine Arts.
ILANA MANOLSON
manolson.com
This e-catalogue is designed for an upcoming exhibition at the Whyte Museum, Banff, Alberta.