Impressionistic events in nature naturalistically depicted and those surreally suggesting natural events are the dual streams in Ann Kraus’s work in Above and Beyond. The relationship between these modes of expression rests upon an amorphous middle ground stylistically and formally sourced. Form originates from actual iterations that structure and compound inspiration.
There’s a broad range to Kraus’s depictions of the sky. The artist has traveled, and with her she has always taken her fascination with the boundless upper reaches. She sketches them endlessly but also employs a camera to document a sequential engagement with her subject matter, so as not to miss out on especially choice impressions. It’s in the active and the after-the-fact engagement that her subject reveals itself. The implicit rendering of nature not specifically circumscribed by the departure point of a physical landscape into realms of cloudscape are at the heart of Kraus’s work. Nature is open to as much interpretation as the will finds possible. The print allows for a certain finality of gesture that gives presence to the immense force at hand in the natural event without the illustrative stagecraft in picturing each cloud system, the greater sky around it, and the ocean or land close by. It is compared to painting a view through a microscope rather than a dramatic projection in a theater, though in no way less sublime. In choosing the elements that she does, Kraus achieves a series of elliptical moments that range from tender to expansive. One can read a single impression into these images or one can wander esthetically around each one, seeking alternate impressions, allowing each one its power to affect over others.
Above is contextually idealistic. The artist’s intimation that the viewer, like herself, should “look up” suggests a willingness to commit ourselves to a higher aesthetic, and whether that translates to images or to beliefs, it’s still provisionally indicative of a willfully altered state of mind. Humanity spent a millenia looking up, so it’s nothing intrinsically new, but to encourage our sense of wonder is an important artistic role to which Kraus happily submits. It makes me think of the famous quote from Hamlet, when encountering the skull of his father’s former court jester, he so solemnly states “There’s more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy!” Though with far less bathos, Kraus interprets this edict as a means of freeing the mind from its petty everyday minutiae to enjoy the clouds above.
By comparison, Beyond is introspective and cerebral, immersing the viewer in a universe of interior meaning that embodies neither an idealism nor its absence or opposite. The details in each work from this series are generally less important as sensory indicators. Each image is like a petri dish where all the myriad as yet unobserved matters of a teeming life are unveiled. Looking beyond is not merely an indicator as to the augury of the mysterious, but an option to examine with deft attention the activity of essential materials.
Ann Kraus is a portrayer of ineffables. Her paintings of clouds and her abstract prints both skirt the edges of what is traditionally considered proper subject manner. She is not just depicting what is there, but is denying the importance of more prosaic and provisional subjects, such as everyday scenes of domestic or workaday life, or those in which the body, clothed or nude, as a connection between artifice and our personal narratives. Her scenes have no people in them, they depict places with no structure but that which the viewer can bring to them. We are invited in one circumstance to join her in reading clouds, seeing the same symbolic story she lived. In the other, we are given keyholes that look out upon a greater universe, in a medium not normally given to causality. It’s important to consider not merely the symbolic or speculative quality of her work, but how formal accomplishments allow the works to demand more or us. The complete oeuvre represented in “Above and Beyond” is easily more than the sum of its parts, because their combination does not create a resulting theory or solution to answer all plausible questions, but alternately confronts the sources of inspiration and the products of the imagination. They coalesce together, alternating between the seen and the perceived. Both of them enlarge what we understand as the definition of “having an experience” and the knowledge they access for us, though not immediately quantifiable, is no less important for that fact. Together they set the mind dancing on the edge of its next range of questions.
To have emerged from a past that no longer exists is the legacy, and perhaps the tragedy, of those who live long enough to alter and reconstitute their identity. For Pat Benincasa, the obsolescence of the Industrial Era in American history held not only dreams in its wake, but lives. Her work encompasses the structures, the towns and cities, the greater American landscape around them, and the specific if frequently forgotten accomplishments of figures from this world. She has taken cultural possession of the past. Within its fabric hides a rich palimpsest where memory and the imagination meet. She excavates and celebrates the details that make up this history. Benincasa’s oeuvre encompasses three distinct bodies of work. One is devoted to the industrial structures; the second to the streets and avenues of Rust Belt cities, that were known for specific industrial products, and became communities; and for her newest project, “Women At The Wheel,” a series of history markers commemorating the lives and accomplishments of many forgotten or little known pioneers in industry and women’s rights. She has recently completed a film exploring each of her female heroes, that in it comprises a related body of work extending her authority. In consideration of the history of place, one cannot do a greater justice than to attend to the structures and environments that have housed the engines of industry. Though these places lack the tenderness of homes in neighborhoods, they do not fail but to impress upon us the force of endeavor. In their obsolescence, they take on a grandeur that marks them not as mere detritus, but as historical ruins. Unlike many comparable structures possessed of symbolic identities, they occupy space that still may have some hope of being revitalized, if economic prosperity returns to the cities of Detroit, Flint, or Akron. Benincasa’s extended focus upon these structures and the environment which they characterized pays tribute to the importance of history, and though some may assume they also contribute to ruin porn, such attitudes do nothing to address either the questions of history or the need for change. Beninacasa does both. Though it may prove difficult for Americans to admit that these are in fact ruins, that even within our short national history, that some portion of the whole has reached a point beyond which it could not go.
IRON SKY, 2014 | Encaustic, paint, wood, and cement on sheet metal, 24 x 36 inches
Though it’s central to Benincasa’s work, the demise and struggles of the areas she depicts are in themselves a worthy and encompassing discussion. Yet it’s her own images and models for this historical situation that matter, not arguments surrounding them. Her devotion to the depiction of such scenes has led her circuitously to address not only the metaphoric and impressionistic parables, but also the relational civic and social structures, and the lives, many of them storied, that emerged from or correlated to the automotive industry and just as easily folded into it and were, for a time, forgotten. Benincasa places these stories back into our hands.
Benincasa’s Sheet Metal Paintings have a prosaic, even pragmatic appearance, because they take their inspiration from and even sample maps of certain cities that inhabit the imagination of the culture of industry, places that had a time and then lost it. Some are being slowly reborn while others have suffered further calamities: Akron and Youngstown (Ohio), Detroit and Flint (Michigan), Gary (Indiana), and Hamilton, Ontario in Canada, near Toronto. Real places contain complexities of construction that include all of the machines needed to make the products that drive an economy. Cars, tires, machine parts, the steel itself needed to create skyscrapers and railroad tracks, all of these were not only central to the region of the Rust Belt but were their very reason for existing in the first place. Cities founded by corporations, with whole communities of individuals and families both equally dependent upon the dictates of the bottom line, living not so much in a Democracy as in a shadow version of one. Then, with the decline of these industries came the destruction of the social and moral fiber of these persons and communities. Benincasa is likewise influenced by the variety of her formal concerns as they respond, periodically over time when the demands of a specific series or project necessitate, and focus into one genre of imagery, constructions, or the like. Her early Sheet Metal Paintings depicted the outward appearances of the factories, and she went where she needed to in order to find imagery commanding aesthetic attention. In many cases these areas were cordoned off, due to being dangerously contaminated since the immediate shutdowns of the factories left them derelict and decayed. These were never intended to be hospitable environments beyond their use to industry. Yet Benincasa reveres such places, and brings her reverence into the realms of both the sensory and the sublime.
The sorts of spaces that exist in her works are unlike any other social context. We are accustomed to looking upon photographs of such scenes, but paintings and other creative forms of expression are more rare. Few artists possess the courage to deal directly with this subject matter instead of transforming it into a symbolic abstraction that reflects more conceptual and sometimes grandiose forms. Since 2011, Benincasa has pursued an expansive view—a visual history—of these symbolically charged sites. They range back and forth from nearly photorealist depictions of industrial settings such as Ore Yard Pennsylvania (2013) and Iron Sky (2014), in which we are able to view the decrepit factories from the inside out, with nothing left of them but pipes, ducts, and the muted metal forms that previously supported walls and ceilings. Everything else has been stripped away or has decayed over time, filled with sky and air. To look upon these scenes cannot be done without a sort of reverence, for here are the huge spaces and some still standing remnants of the furnaces that helped build and protect America. Some of these are transformed with the addition of sculptural elements extending the realism of the settings. For Lackawanna Ore Bridge (2015) and Republic Steel (2016), Benincasa constructed the metal bridges and trestles that were the actual connections between sites of transfer and ones of loading and unloading of raw materials entering the factory environment. Their magnified presence allows viewers to more consequently feel as if they are face to face with the forms, alternately practical, visceral, and spectral, that intersects between work and dreams. Alternately, she also creates traditional paintings that evoke the furnace of heat and energy that a factory really is in its most profound, productive moments. River Rouge (2013-14) presents eight small vignettes of exterior factory scenes that alternate between cool blue and a flurry of steam and heat rising from the metal ‘skin’ of the factory animal. Their small scale presents a cacophony of organ like forms that could be any sort of mysterious beast, while their variety point at how multifaceted the scene is when walking around one of them, how each contains secret corners and vast canyons of space. For despite their pure use value, these mass objects are proof of the imagination of a society leaning into its future. At the time when these factories were first made, they represented the pinnacle of industrial accomplishment. In Burning Sky Blast Furnace (2015) we are presented with the full frontal face of a massive factory, the sky red with fumes, or perhaps the setting sun reflecting the metallic tones of the heated interior where steel and cars were being continually produced.
LACKAWANNA ORE BRIDGE, 2015, Encaustic, cement, wood, and paint on sheet metal, 24 x 76 inches
Benincasa’s most recent project has been “Women At The Wheel,” a series of paintings of heroic women who have held positions in the automotive world, some of them supporting other women in areas of social justice. They include Joan Newton Cuneo (2014), who was the first-ever female racecar driver, who raced against and beat many of her male contemporaries, and set several national speed records, until they appealed to the major sponsor of auto farces, AAA, who had “all women” barred from the sport. Her portrait shows a stern and dedicated countenance with her hands gripping a steering wheel, her racing uniform decorated with the medals of her accomplishments. Another is of Mary Andersen (2014), who actually designed and held the original patent for windshield wipers, but though she took them to every car manufacturer, she was repeatedly told that they had no commercial value. Benincasa has created a film to further explicate and dramatize the epitomies symbolized by each case. Its subsequent documentary narration accompanied by examples of the works in succession is an exemplary model for the genre of cultural rediscovery.
Family and community are the real identifiers of place and not industry—no matter what the history books would have us think. Though this context is not outwardly evident, it is a core element of her practice. The artist is not merely judged by what she makes, but also and most importantly why. No matter how far the artist may go to distance her from the traditional roles, they are imbued in her identity by their ability to impose a moral self-identification that few other ideas will ever replace. Pat Benincasa is an artist of the sort one rarely encounters these days: a dreamer who is also a builder and a pragmatist. She brings to her creative pursuit identifications and drives that have been behind societal and historical change since the founding of The United States of America. The pioneer is someone who not only enters new territory, but who reinvigorates old ideas and experiences. Its spirit remains strong within those who have seen loss, and whose territories are to be renewed from the inside. She is a maker, but a large part of her was already produced in the factory of family, the community of values that have been translated and transformed into art.
WOMEN AT THE WHEEL: MARY ANDERSON, 2014 Encaustic, paint, and marker with windshield wipers on sheet metal, 12 x 15 x 1 ¾ inches
The challenge of the painter is to invent a version of the world that adds to our own while also amassing a diverse range of expressions that reflects the accumulated knowledge of a particular experience. This is then injected into the process that allows them to invent anew with each canvas, like an equation or solvent that enables all the other elements to seek the most comprehensive solution possible. For Katherine Parker, the spark that begins the alchemy of her transformative paintings, The Ghost Town series, is a tangent where opposing forces meet, commingle, and give birth to an idiosyncratic vision that is fought and won each time, leaving its marks of passage for all to view.
The artist begins with an empty canvas but is already filling it up in her mind before a single brush meets the surface. Certain structures or amounts of painterly matter are in the mind, and must be put down initially even if they are due to be obscured. This is the case in each of Parker’s paintings. Though she works large (a majority of her canvases measure five by six feet in scale), every square inch of each work has seen the paintbrush. Parker’s education took place at the feet of two masters of the expressive painterly tradition, Milton Resnick and Louise Fishman; and alongside them, the critical perspectives of Irving Sandler, a critic best known in the early phase of his career for aligning himself with the “New York School” painters who became known for Abstract Expressionism—Pollock, DeKooning, Ad Reinhardt, and so forth. Sandler was the only contemporary critic allowed to penetrate the social ranks of this artistic community. The lessons she gleaned from them obviously took root in a major way; for Parker is one of those whose rigor and vision maintain the viability of the painterly
OBSCURA, 2016, Oil on canvas, 68 x 64 inches
Obscura (2016) is a dark painting with strips and bits of color peeking through its mostly black surface. Beneath the colors one spies a lattice of sorts, as if a structure of strong forms were at first lain down. Parker begins with very authoritative structures and then paints over them, simultaneously obscuring them while leading us in a completely different direction. We are still allowed to glimpse what lies underneath, but only as part of a process that at one time needed specific structures but no longer does. This gives us the message that structures, though sometimes esthetically pleasing, are not the end result of a true creative endeavor. Rather we should be willing to have further layers revealed to us, and that we should revel in the convergence of opposites. If one stares into the dark outer layers for a time, marks and ghosts of marks become visible. These inconsistencies are like the emanations of the mind projecting into a deep darkness that boggles the senses and threatens bodily security. Like a deep ocean or cave, it is an alien environment in which the eyes must adjust. What we see there is the very life of the composition emerging from beneath, like the secrets of a lost innocence.
THE CONVERSATION, 2017, Oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
The Conversation (2017) is a different sort of painting. A large white expanse covers most of one canvas with the lowered area covered by a light blue rectangle possibly resembling a table. Above it are two squares suggestively drawn and colored, one in blue and the other in yellow; they inhabit opposite sides in the logistical middle of the canvas, and they seem to be involved in some sort of confrontation, like two players in contest of wills. Below them, written in white on white in all caps is a single word: YES. It’s unclear which party has made this affirmative pronouncement, of if it is meant as a verification of the efficacy of the dynamism between them. Yes, this is conversation. Each says Yes. Each races to say Yes. Yes is both the greeting and the answer, like a note in a composition of musical counterpoint.
TOUCHING DOWN, 2017, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 84 x 60 inches
Touching Down (2017), presents a mostly blue and white painted canvas with three squares at the bottom and rectangle drifting down to touch them. Its title is an expression that came into usage when mankind officially entered the Space Age, with the capsule of a rocket returning home, the base of the compartment landing back upon the earth. Yet there is something very intimate in the expression that takes it beyond Landing. Touching down is touching, being intimate with the earth. The expression implies not only arrival but presence as well. This painting has as its central impression a moment of merging, a conflation of objects that double as locations or persons. Invisible sparks are generated in the margin between them, as parts of a long unfinished puzzle rush to fit and meet one another.
PALE EDGES, 2016, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 48 x 36 inches
Yet despite the assistance of titles, Parker still makes paintings that draw us in with the use of formal elements alone. They are psychological portraits of the evolving consciousness of the artist. Pale Edges (2016) is one of these. The title infers that the exterior edges of the work are part of a metaphor for experience leading us “beyond the pale” – into strange lands and new unknown experiences that threaten not only the familiar but also the proper. The painter is emphatically saying, here is what matters, look at what’s here. The edge is pale but the center is full of color—full of life. A light blue canvas verging on Aquamarine contains three squared forms, one that is long and wide and splits the canvas into two areas, its continuity beyond the edges making it feel like a river. Above it are two square forms, a small one on top the same hue as the river, while the larger one in-between is purple. The ambiguity of the construction leads us to endlessly consider the dynamic between edges and contents. They are both full and very empty, filled and yet reflective. They possess the ambiguity of a person.
SLIPPAGE, 2017, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 84 x 60 inches
Last but far from least there is a painting named Slippage (2017) that I find to be most impressive among her works. Its scale seems magnified by the pearlescent wash of color in brushy grids up and down the length of the painting, with a window in the middle in a more golden hue, as if the morning sun were flooding in. Below it and above to the right are darker areas of blue, as if a cloud and a shadow accompanied the shimmer of new light that is both coming from the window and reflecting off every stroke all around it. It is beautiful yet spooky. Parker uses manually depicted geometric forms like squares and grids to establish a lattice or construction of matter while relinquishing the authority of distinct and objective classifications. A door is a door but it can also be a window, or portal to another location or to an entirely different universe. We are there, with her, at the threshold.
