Katja Mater, Dancing in the Desert to 'You are so Damn Hot' by OK Go, 2008. C-print, 51 x 59 inches. Courtesy of Mahan Gallery.
This past October, Mahan Gallery presented an exhibition of paintings, drawings, photography, and collage by nine globally recognized artists who share a strong interest in symbolical narrative. The exhibition functioned as a survey of mountainous aesthetics, simultaneously exploring the fables, folklores, and assumed simulations of the mountain by the artists or interpretation of the curator, Colleen Grennan. Subjects touched on in the exhibition included prophecy, trance, delight, shame, pain, dreaming, madness, laughter, and the different shapes the mountain can possess. The exhibition’s strange title, which included the symbol for the mountain, ^^^^^: The Allegory of the Mountain, took the vast thematic potential of the mountain, allowing interpretations to flow from specific to ambivalent.
Variations on this theme spanned a seemingly endless gap. This could be seen from the Abstract Expressionist gestures and drips of Chinese-style epic mountain-scape paintings by Michelle Blade to Bryson Gill’s graphite drawing of a man’s reflection on the side of a mountain interpreting a meditative state; the decadence represented in Natalie Lanese’s paintings alluded to prophetical pilgrimages, and the scrambled field paintings of Brendan Lott invoked a simulated Zen or trance of the mountain. Katja Mater offered the viewer supernatural visions of dancers while Hilary Pecis’ collages depicted futuristic landscapes denoting time and space. Matthew Porter’s portraits of cowboys and zeppelins traversed one another in a parallel narration. Catherine Ryan’s drawings remained stagnant in a reverie of mysticism and disconnection of person to place. Lastly, the sculptural achievements of Daniel Tierney mimicked the mass as an expression of being, with the idea of verticality and center, thereby completing the collection of work in this exhibition.
Although showing under the same delegated theme, all of the artists involved demonstrated contemporary art’s ability to think in vastly different degrees at the same time, from literal depictions of impressive ranges, to underlying, abstract religious inferences, to allusive spiritual relations between man and mountain.
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