#2: 10/09/2020

Artist and writer Benjamin Terrell recently wrote a column that touches on fire, regeneration, and the works of John Dilg, Helen Mirra, and Harold Ancart. You can also find this and other columns by Terrell in the Eugene Register Guard.

you can't be afraid to leave it all behind
by benjamin terrell

"Dilg's small canvases shimmer in a mist of threadlike brushstrokes..."

John Dilg, Immigrant, 2017, oil on canvas, 14" x 18"​
Photo courtesy of The National Exemplar

Recently, as the smoke thickened, I left my house and art studio, most of my belongings, and all my paintings behind; my family and I were being ushered out of our neighborhood by evacuation orders, state troopers and bad air. In times of smoldering uncertainty nature forces us indoors (with the virus) and, as with the Holiday Farm fire, nature forces us back out. As an artist, the potential loss of things, valuables, even art itself could be viewed as a possible creative clearing, like the way a forest is made into a field, ultimately good for new growth. Is creativity the fire or the forest floor, the act itself or in the empty canvas we show up with? We are separate from our stories like the magic of art itself is in process more than its product. Since the fire rapidly spread down the 126, my iPhone now reminds me in a nightly text from google maps, "take a different route home" and I add to that symbolic suggestion, the only way home is to not be afraid to leave it all behind.

John Dilg, Birch, 2018, oil on canvas, 14" x 18
Photo courtesy of The National Exemplar

Normally this time of year up the McKenzie where I live, animals are either camouflaging themselves to survive or becoming more colorful in order to reproduce. Usually I walk the forestry roads with my dog where adult deer and their young are cocoa colored and often seen motionless. Back at the house, male wild turkeys are the opulent opposite, their feathers feature a metallic sheen, caruncles (fleshy rubbery necks) colored bright red as they slowly strut amongst the earthy colored others. Artists too, can creatively conceal or color themselves anew while adapting to creative challenges or when faced with a world sometimes seeming wrong side up.

Installation shots from The National Exemplar.

The Paintings of John Dilg and the textiles of Helen Mirra at the National Exemplar in Iowa City are an excellent example of two things made more mystical when seen together. Dilg's small canvases shimmer in a mist of threadlike brushstrokes and describe spare dream states with water, wolves, lone figures, and open skies. The subject of his work isn't the objects that occupy the paintings but the moment in time itself, always a symposium of stillness in soft grey greens and powder blue hues. Helen Mirra's similarly sized pieces in silk and linen aren't pictorial but appear painterly, like trees and reeds seen through smoke or rain. They are poetry to Dilg's prose.

Helen Mirra, Late May, early June, Trisha Brown Stanley Brouwn, 2017,
linen, silk, 21 3/8" x 8 5/8"
Photo courtesy of The National Exemplar

In Dilg's world a rock formation or the bark of a birch tree has an undisclosed order, is symmetrical and both grand and intimate. His leaving or letting go of detail is a reverent pairing down like the cautious steps of a hunter who respects what he sets out to capture. Similarly, traces of the human hand in Mirra's tapestries are like tracks in fresh snow and like footprints, point to tactile paths of process and place also indicated by titles like "Pale tying bale edging" and "Late May early June, Trisha Brown Stanley Brown 2017".

"...traces of the human hand in Mirra's tapestries are like tracks in fresh snow..."
​
Helen Mirra, Pale tying bale edging, 2016, linen, 11 1/4" x 12 1/8"
Photo courtesy of The National Exemplar

Installation shots from The National Exemplar.

An advocate for the energy of the in-between, the art of Harold Ancart, at David Zwirner gallery in New York, is abundantly incendiary in style and subject. An Ancart painting is often an image of something hot or cold, like a giant iceberg or an oversized head of a match ready to be struck. Orange orbs, pale pink moons and rainbow hued leaves all are found flickering over black and white backgrounds. Color versus its vast black opposite, the picture plane as meeting place for old and new, a rest stop between tradition and its trajectory. 

"Ancart often pick-pockets potentiality from the dormant and undisturbed."

Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2020.
© Harold Ancart / SABAM, Brussels
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

For the current show the artist paints trees seen close up, often between branch or bloom or as neither trunk nor top but as origins of transformation. There is a similarity between his old and new paintings. A tree trunk is a matchstick to the flame of its fruit or imagined as a green mushroom cloud over a funnel of forest organically ignited. Ancart often pick-pockets potentiality from the dormant and undisturbed. The inclusion of a miniature flat square concrete pool sculpture ( like an empty canvas on its back, its "water" blue and blank) would seem to suggest stillness. For Ancart, it implies the unlimited capacity of art itself.

Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2020. 
© Harold Ancart / SABAM, Brussels
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2020. 
© Harold Ancart / SABAM, Brussels
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Not much more than a year ago, at 4:13pm (as the cell phone photo tells me) my wife and I sat outside the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Perhaps the act or action that started a fire that consumed much of the church was just then happening. We heard the sirens only hours later when napping back in our hotel a mile away. It occurred to me when walking back toward the billowing smoke, that the cloud (colored yellow and smelling of dense wood) was hundreds of years of history and art ignited and imbued by equal years of prayer. While the prayers for survival aren't always granted, the embers of imagination fanned by artistic intent always create something reassuring and new.

Ben's wife Claudia at 4:13 and Notre Dame a few hours later.
Photos courtesy of Benjamin Terrell.

In the wake of the recent Holiday Farm fire near Eugene, Oregon.
Photo courtesy of Benjamin Terrell.

The art of John Dilg and Helen Mirra can be seen at the National Exemplar's website, thenationalexemplar.squarespace.com. The work of Harold Ancart is on display at David Zwirner gallery in New York city until October 17th.

Press release from the National Exemplar:
AUGUST 1 - SEPTEMBER 20, 2020
John Dilg has a sense of awe for the natural world, and Helen Mirra has no sense of separation with it. Their artworks resonate through literal and figurative means, choice of media, color and associative titling. Helen Mirra weaves abstract tapestries with linen and silk, material indications of physical activity, registering where she is and how it feels. John Dilg paints invented landscapes featuring what he calls essential forms, drawing on memory and tonality to emphasize stillness and the continuum of time.

Helen Mirra, b. 1970, Rochester, New York, lives in Muir Beach, California.
​John Dilg, b. 1945, Evanston, Illinois, lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Benjamin Terrell's artwork can be found on his Instagram page @moseswaits and in The Semi-Finalist's post "Here and There, Mostly There." Terrell has also written about about Matthew Wong, Kwang Young Chun, and others for a column in the Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon) called ​Cafe 541. Terrell lives up the McKenzie River, not far from Eugene, Oregon.