I recently saw a rich tapestry of an exhibition from artist Maria Antelman at Yancey Richardson in New York that was just great.
The exhibition paired imagery of the human form with similarly immediate, surprisingly personal imagery drawn from nature, both organic and inorganic. And in individual pieces, Antelman tended to frame the imagery — as in, via the actual frames — in a manner that imbued what we saw with holistic, creative power.
Antelman’s “Natural Man” (2021) puts a close-up image of a tree trunk of some kind in front of a similarly close image of a person’s bare chest via a distinct, rectangular frame mounted in the front. And the image of the individual in what’s effectively the quasi-background, whose face is not included, is spread out enough that the tree trunk looks to embed itself where we’d anticipate crucial internal organs, like a heart and lungs.
I also got pleasantly stuck on “Tree Talker” (2023), in which a person’s legs snake beneath what looks like a tree root growing in part above the ground’s surface.
In Antelman’s images, we find the human form and our natural world materializing together in front of us in metaphysical — but distinct — communion.
Below, I wrote some poetry while pondering the images. I was excited to try this idea, honestly.
Best wishes to the gallery and artist!
Sparks
by Valerie Bright, inspired by artworks from Maria Antelman
I see the retreating trees and hay bales, and I
Spark.
The abandoned, devotional tree, growing out of the
Pulsing rows of vibratory ocean waves, growing from the
Art gallery's sailboat walls.
And I'm rending
Myself from the
Forested cathedral's steps.
Planted in the stage, I find the sun in the rafters, it
Burns, throwing me backwards like a childhood stovetop.
I begin to read the bricks’ singing artifice, joined by a chorus of the shorn
Agave plants that will bear the weight of our sins on the
Easter Sunday cross by the road as
Vinous drapery prostrates itself.
A weed grows in the corner of the kitchen, and the
Sunlight
Cracks the sailboated windows that salute the trodding winds.
And then I stop in the garden on the second floor.
In growth, there is
Yearning.
In the constructed spires against the ever fluttering clouds, there is
The bulldozed landscape’s evangelizing, toothy grin.
It’s strange to think of the
Ghosts among whom we live, in whose chorus line
I find
Myself, lined up behind a silently preaching pastor’s back, beneath the windows that layer the resurrected light.
And what of the resounding, heaving earth’s chasmic yawns and fragile, glass pane
Whispers?
The
Sunlight is streaming outwards from between my
Own bones.
Now, I believe in kindness in the makeup aisle and
picking up plastic bags. I wish on the
Browned maple leaf.
And in those days, the
Traffic cone will lie down with the oak tree, the
Trucker hat will rest with the water's ripple, and the
Dilapidated van will reside with the wild blueberry bush.
