With Low-Anchored Cloud at Marcia Wood Gallery (through January 13), Joseph Peragine delivers vanitas paintings for the Anthropocene, and, like those lushly painted 17th century Dutch still lifes that remind us of the transience of life and its earthly pleasures, his world is full of beauty and portent.
But while the Dutch employed tumescent fruit on the verge of turning, snuffed but still-smoking candles, fragile soap bubbles, clocks and the human skull to convey their messages of the inevitability of death — memento mori, remember you, too, must die — Peragine softens the same blow with subversively vibrant images of the beauty of life here on Earth. He seduces with comfort and the familiarity of images you think you know and a sense that all is well with the world, but all is not as it seems.
It is a message that lands with a thud of realization made even louder and more distressing by the contrast between the two. That spotted baby fawn safely curled in cartoon-green grass actually is cowering. Those pink-eyed bunnies gamboling across a field of pastel flowers? Just what are they running from?
Peragine takes his title from a poem of the same name by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. “Low-anchored cloud . . . Drifting meadow of the air,/Where bloom the daisied banks and violets.” The fog or mist of Thoreau’s low cloud obscures and protects the flora and the fauna of the forest, but Peragine’s is a more metaphorical representation of all we don’t see.
The exhibition comprises two related but distinct bodies of work, Spring Hoax and the ongoing series After the Hunt. As installed here, Spring Hoax, a collection of paintings that Peragine began in 2020 during the first spring of Covid-19, comprises a grid of 36 small (20 x 16) acrylics on canvas. Ferns, lilies, birds and bees dance with Day-of-the-Dead brightness across the surfaces, while within every one of them a skull lurks, in some more evidently than others, but ever-present in each. Something wicked this way comes, just as it did that spring.
One can almost feel a near-nostalgia for that once-upon-a-time bewilderment we felt then at the outset of what became the Covid-19 pandemic. Remember how the Earth seemed to reclaim its pristine beauty as it knitted itself together in the wake of our retreat? Spring ascended. Crystalline blue skies prevailed. Birdsong rang out in the new void of our sequestration. Were the stars ever really this close?
We noticed things . . . But, as in these paintings, something was amiss, and I mean that in a good way. Something was afoot, if only a low-anchored miasma that we did not yet fully understand. This is where the nostalgia comes in — now we do understand and we understand so much more about everything now than we did then, and it’s even worse than we thought.
After the Hunt seems to pose the question in its series title — after the hunt, then what? This is especially so in one eponymous painting that features a dead hare nailed to a tree branch by its back right leg.
It hangs upside down, simultaneously obscene and tender. A low-anchored mist obscures the background, but the foreground is full of abiding flowers which look on as if asking that very question: Now what?
With few exceptions, humans are present only by the evidence of their actions. In one of these, Slipping Slowly Through the Sky, we see only the Gustonesque splayed-toed soles of a pair of cartoonish bare feet, seemingly (at least to me) “pushing up daisies” along with the real daisies and other flowers that crowd the riverbank beside a slow-moving gray stream. Moths circumnavigate a spotlight moon.
Pearl River, one of the strongest in the show, calls upon fond Peraginian tropes: cuddly animals in things are-not-as-they-seem, storybook-illustration settings — but here he takes them into trippy, psychedelic territory. Reflections in the water are ziggy; splash drops are elongated as if slowed down in time; even the bunny looks stoned.
Pair this with Ceramic Fawn across the gallery. This earliest work in the show (2019) is sumptuously rendered, albeit unsettlingly so, in mostly black and white. The gleaming figure looks away, seemingly unaware of our presence, attending to something she sees but we cannot. (She is ceramic, after all, so she is “seeing” nothing; but, because she is Peraginian, we forget that salient fact.)
Peragine brings a Thoreauvian eye to his observation of nature and disarms with a beautifully painted but charming backdoor delivery of his message, so Low-Anchored Cloud left me thinking also of Thoreau’s slightly younger contemporary, Emily Dickinson, who wrote “Tell all the truth but tell it slant — the truth must dazzle gradually.”
Unlike his 17th century progenitors, Peragine’s modern vanitas are designed not for the salvation of an individual life but to remind the viewer that it may well be life itself in its many iterations that is at stake. Its demise, or at least its degradation, is happening on our watch, so, unlike Dickinson, we may not have time to tell it slant.
::
Donna Mintz is a visual artist who writes about art and literature. A current studio artist at Atlanta Contemporary, her work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art and MOCA GA. She writes for the Sewanee Review, Sculpture magazine, BurnAway and ArtsATL, where she is a regular contributor. She recently completed a book on the life of writer James Agee and holds an MFA from Sewanee’s School of Letters at the University of the South.
