Time: In the Mountains

ILANA MANOLSON Time: In The Mountains

A WORD FROM THE WHYTE MUSEUM The Whyte Museum is pleased to present Ilana Manolson’s exhibition, Time: In the Mountains. This is an eloquent invitation to look deeper, to listen more carefully, and to carry those memories into personal experiences that shape a lifetime.

To David who shared each path with me.

Artists are cultural and environmental first responders. They are the first to sense the nuanced changes around them, and to respond with works of art that are challenging, poignant, and beautiful. These works open up the way into difficult conversations.

Time: In the Mountains 96” x 72” Acrylic on Yupo

Ilana is a generous and thoughtful first responder. She draws on years of hiking and painting in nature to comment on the change she has seen in the mountains. Hers is a clear-eyed view that recognizes the pace at which the earth evolves, mountains shift, grow, and soften. Her works leave open spaces to be filled by our imaginations and hopes.

She sees the landscape as a scroll, unfolding gradually as a natural journey. She paints with knowledge and curiosity in a way that is energizing and exciting, leaving us eager to discover what’s happening next.

The Whyte Museum is committed to drawing on its collections, exhibitions, programs, and Indigenous stories to connect visitors more closely with nature. Ilana’s stunning works provide a warm guide on how to look at the world around us with fresh eyes, and to consider the role we can play in it.

Donna Livingstone CEO Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies

What We Choose 19” x 22” Acrylic on Yupo

ILANA MANOLSON: THOUGHTS ACROSS TIME AND PLACE

By Lawrence R. Rinder Ilana 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.

The Monumental and the Molecular 30” x 80” Acrylic on Yupo

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.

Pattern of Place 30” x 53” Acrylic on Yupo

In her most monumental work in this exhibition, the fifty-six-foot long scroll painting, Schumann Resonance I, 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 I. 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 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.

Schumann Resonance I detail 30” x 364 1/2” Acrylic on Yupo

Another feature of Schumann Resonance I and II 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.

Schumann Resonance II 30” x 255” Acrylic on Yupo

What We Preserve 60” x 76” Acrylic on Yupo

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.

The Giants We Stand With 30” x 55 1/4” Acrylic on Yupo

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 Art History Held Between Stone and Water 48” x 94” Acrylic on Yupo

Luminous Shadow

48” x 74” Acrylic on Yupo

Across Time and Place 9 1/4” x 36” Acrylic on Yupo

Current

69” x 75” Acrylic on Yupo

Subteranean Comings and Goings diptych 76” x 40” Acrylic on Yupo

Merging Moments 51” x 43” Collage on Yupo

A WORD FROM THE ARTIST

These measurements are outlined below: ·

Artist Time - As an avid hiker, I revisit many of the same places year after year. I have watched changes in Banff and Yoho as glaciers shrink and disappear. From visit to visit I commit the views to memory, yet experience them with fresh eyes.

The Rocky Mountains of Western Canada are the touchstone where I return to locate myself and recharge my spirit. They are my birthplace, the site of my first job as a naturalist, and the location of my first residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. They are also the inspiration for my current exhibit Time: In the Mountains. This show delves into three major themes relating to the Rockies; the perception of time, the heartbeat of the earth, and the alchemy of materials.

Perception of Time Time, actual and perceived, can be measured in many ways and on many scales. These include cultural calendars, human life spans, plant growth, decay, and regeneration, celestial revolutions, and diurnal/ nocturnal spans. In this series I focus on distinct ways to perceive and measure time in the mountains.

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Tourist Time - I watch the the frozen moments observed by one-time visitors who take pictures and leave with photos in hand, hoping to retain connection with a unique personal experience.

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Mountain Time - I witness the slow, powerful, hard-to-conceptualize pace at which the earth evolves geologically and the mountains shift, grow, and soften.

Hiking in the mountains over weeks every year, I absorb the landscape both as an immediate experience and as synthesized memories.

I created the largest piece in Time: In the Mountains, entitled Schumann Resonance I, as a scroll unfolding and revealing itself bit by bit.

This structure mirrors the experience of progressing through time and space, always anticipating the next turn. As with a hike, it is not possible to see the entirety at once – the viewing itself is a journey.

In particular reference to Chinese and Japanese scroll paintings, Dawn Delbanco of Columbia University wrote, “the scroll is both painted image and documentary history; past and present are in continuous dialogue. As the scroll unfurls, so the narrative or journey progresses.” Harking back to this older tradition, my scrolls take the viewer on an experiential journey in which different parts reflect different points in time or memory.

Heartbeat of the Earth To reflect my concerns about the fragility of the earth’s health, I imbedded in the scroll repetitive painted marks of EKG-like rhythms of the earth. In my research, I learned that the earth and ionosphere have a magnetic “rhythm” called the Schumann Resonance. Metaphorically, the Schumann Resonance is called the “heartbeat of the earth.” For all of recorded time, the Shumann Resonance remained constant at 7.83 Hz, which is equivalent to a beat every .13 seconds. In recent years, the Schumann Resonance has begun increasing in speed, a change I take as an indication of damage being done to the earth’s health.

BANFF Study

14” x 11” Acrylic on Yupo

Alchemy To capture the simultaneous power and fragility of the changing cycles of the natural world, I build up surfaces, fusing elements of sculpture, painting, collage and printmaking to convey the spirit of place. A wide variety of paint flows and textural densities contrast the minute and the monumental, the particularities and the vastness of the Rockies.

My art is a poetic response to natural phenomena: water, earth, and plant life. At the interface of representation and abstraction, the seen and imagined, I search for the essence of landscape in a mark, a flow of paint, a texture or scale changes, a sharp or gradual transition in value or color. The marks and pools of paint celebrate tenacious life cycles in which some species thrive and others disappear. Swaths of pure, fluid color appear wave-like close up, and then fall into perspective at a distance, confounding and surprising the viewer. As I manipulate the fluidity of the medium it becomes a metaphor for resurgence and dying. I celebrate the natural world and its ineffable mysteries, even as we are aware of potential disaster. Even in the coming apart, there is great beauty.

Indian Paintbrush 14” x 11” Acrylic on Yupo

ILANA MANOLSON manolson.com This catalog is designed for the show Time:In the Mountains at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.

June 2024