At Home with 'Strange Vistas'

At Home with 'Strange Vistas'

Published June 2nd, 2023 by Camille LeFevre

Arizona-raised, Chicago-based artist Mary Griffin's exhibition at Dreamsong is a tribute to the American Southwest and an indictment of its exploitation

 

Since I was a toddler, I’ve spent time in a northern Arizona town just below the Mogollon Rim at the edge of the Colorado Plateau; just south, in other words, of Flagstaff, where artist Mary Griffin was born and has lived, and whose Southwest-inflected work is currently on view at Dreamsong in Minneapolis until June 17. Some background: My town, Griffin’s town, and the area around it, once the provenance of the Dine, Hopi, Apache, and Yavapai, is a tourist mecca. The influx started back in the 1950s, when Hollywood shot many of its westerns, with stars of high-wattage, within the area’s surreally spectacular scenery. Visitors started visiting, but the town stayed sleepy until the 1990s when the Internet became available to the public. 

In the early naughts, when social-media megaliths such as Facebook were founded, followed by Instagram in 2010, quiet time was over. We were “discovered.” No more off-season, when you could drive to the grocery store with ease, head to your favorite trailhead for a contemplative hike, meet a friend for dinner without waiting in traffic for an hour. So, when Covid shut my town down, we cheered. Then, just months later, tourism exploded and the Disney-fication of our landscape began in earnest.

Here was a gorgeous vacation spot two hours from Phoenix and six hours from SoCal where you could rent an AirBNB and spend your time outside. (Locals and corporations began buying up houses and converting them to short-term rentals.) Lines formed at scenic spots, as tourists spent hours waiting for the perfect selfie (which they then posted with location info). Formerly quiet, narrow hiking trails got beat to shit; off-trail paths to indigenous rock art got widened and littered with trash; millions came to post their adventures on social media, carve their names on rock faces, spend money, and party in neighborhoods formerly occupied by families.

Like Griffin, then, I’m driven to understand, on a personal and political level, the commodification of the Southwest — particularly its landscapes, and its native peoples and their cultures. Like Griffin, who now lives and works in Chicago, I also study, as Dreamsong gallery partner Gregory Smith writes, “how ecological decline re-contextualizes memories of place by contrasting them with the tarnished present.” 

 

Seen Your Video, 2022. Oil, acrylic, spray paint, and paper on canvas, 24 x 18".

 

Of the 13 works in Griffin’s Strange Vista, the oil, acrylic, and spray paint work Seen Your Video most poignantly, and pointedly, captures the essence of the dilemma. In the piece, the shape of a pueblo hovers amorphously in the distance upstaged by a large silver dollar sign skidding in the red dirt. In You Can Have It All, stalks of corn, sacred to many native people of the Southwest, reach toward stretches of holographic paper embedded in the landscape; mirrors in which a visitor can see a distorted view of self. 

For Lee Lee is a large oil on canvas in which two abstracted, intertwined endangered condors — one skeletal, the other winging ocean blue in its wake — wrap around a heron-like creature circling a representation of Horseshoe Bend, a unique meander in the Colorado River near Page where you pay an exorbitant fee to park, walk a short distance, and peer over a cliff edge to the water below. Meanwhile, in the oil-on-yupo piece Anthropocene, a classic northern Arizona sunset — drenched here in deep purples, soft pinks, and a lively tangerine — billows above the Hopi mesas on the Colorado Plateau along in the stretch between Flagstaff and Winslow, before disassembling in palette-knife slashes of excavation (a reference, perhaps, to the area’s copper mining history) and a river bursting into unknown realms below. The work incisively conveys the ways in which humans have, and continue, to alter the landscape.

 

Top: Installation view of Strange Vistas at Dreamsong. Bottom: Twenty One Tumbleweeds, 2022. Oil on canvas, 44 x 52”.

 

Griffin deploys her painter’s tools, and penchant for mark making, in other works as a form of material intervention. In Twenty One Tumbleweeds, a large oil on canvas, the artist uses the carved line to accentuate, reveal, and articulate — particularly the El Camino’s grill and chassis. In Bye Marilyn, acrylic with image transfer on canvas, lines demarcate a sense of implosion as a collaged image of an El Camino veers away from sickly yellow cloud and the scratched out, dissolving collaged images below it. 

To decipher the meaning of the El Camino in Griffin’s work, I turned to native artist Rose Simpson’s Maria, which I marveled at during the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s exhibition Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists. Simpson, a Santa Clara Pueblo artist and car mechanic, found the 1985 El Camino on the side of the road and restored the lowrider with a black-on-black body in tribute to the signature glazes of potter Maria Martinez, a Tewa Indian of San Ildefonso Pueblo. 

In the “Lowrider Capital” of Española, New Mexico, Simpson has said, “. . . cars build identity and create empowerment in disenfranchised peoples.” In Griffin’s work, the car is a symbol that acknowledges yet transcends race. Also, as an icon of the petroleum-guzzling Anthropocene, Griffin’s El Camino not only locates the viewer in a geographical place, but also in a landscape routinely used as backdrop for movie car chases, and tv and print ads for off-roading. As for the future? Note, ironically, the tiny toy Tesla resting on the frame of You Can Have It All.

 

Chicken Scratch, 2023. Oil ground, pigment, dried lavender in antique feed sack on on canvas, 40 x 30".

 

Collage, not just of materials and techniques but also of memories, dominates works like Chicken Scratch, featuring an antique feed sack, bequeathed by Griffin’s grandmother, stuffed with lavender on a painted background of dissolving red, yellow, and black pigment. The immense (60 x 70 inches) Sundown Bog, rich and heavy with saturated black and purple, yellow and orange, pink and white, is a remembrance of time with her Grandfather. Cy Twombly-like loops and scribbles, painted over ephemera (a Mexican loteria card?), and canvas bunched in the corners convey the physicality involved in her work and the ways in which memory gathers and recedes through time. 

An avid thrifter, Griffin takes this physicality and lighter color palette into the realm of spirit in I Dream of You Every Night. The large piece includes a piece of fabric, perhaps an old shirt, crumpled, painted, and given pink edges so it — from a distance only — resembles a bed. Get too close, and the viewer risks getting lost in drifting brushstrokes of yellow and orange gathered in clouds above. From further away, the work expresses a sense of the infinite, the sense of wide-open space in which Southwesterners dwell, whether wide awake or when dreaming of when, again, they will return. ◼︎

 

Sundown Bog, 2023. Acrylic and paper ephemera on canvas, 65 x 70.5".

 

Strange Vistas is on view at Dreamsong through June 17. To see more of the artist's work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram @marycgriffin.

All images courtesy of the gallery.



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