Landscape as Process: The Art of Susan Goethel Campbell, by Robert Sparrow Jones, Michigan Quarterly Review, October, 2014

Susan Goethel Campbell, an environmentalist at the core, is a multidisciplinary artist who is deeply steeped in tradition and profoundly connected to nature. Her work is a slowly evolving dance devoted to researching, collecting data, and balancing two or three projects in different forms of completion at once. She has worked with scientists and meteorologists, but her work is far from rigid. In fact, her ideas are manifested in atmospheric ways that align our thoughts, emotions, and actions with nature.

With her large floor installation, Resisting Certainty at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Campbell takes the art of horticulture and ingeniously turns all conventions upside down. Inverted, natural sod tiles are used as the building blocks of a larger grid. This grid intersects, overlapping three larger, flat geometric planes. The planes are dark and ominous, hovering an inch from the floor and evoking a sense of groundlessness with the shifting change of environment. Together, the organic and the synthetic push our vantage to a further point. In this atmosphere, Campbell provides us with a rich, intuitive approach to discovering and meeting nature with its patterns. These relationships are not only intellectually stimulating, but also emotionally and spiritually satisfying.

Susan Goethel Campbell in her Detroit Landscape, 2014

As Campbell was growing up in the new suburb of East Grand Rapids, Michigan, the idea of “landscape as a process” left a lasting impression on her. She played freely in the open fields among sumac, milkweed, and wild pheasants. In her exploration, deep visceral observations encompassed life and death within the drama of seasons. She understood that change also included the cultural environment that was being built. The hushed bucolic spaces and the emergent landscape would inform the center of her future work.

“The infrastructure for future housing already existed in the landscape and I thought of this as one giant playfield. Two huge, raised sewers were at the bottom of a hill where I used to go sledding. They had raised cement caps with ladders that allowed you to climb down into the sewer. During the summer months, I would climb inside where it was cool and explore what I thought was a ‘natural’ underground river. Seasonal change included not only flowering plants, but newly erected wooden armatures that dotted open fields. The framing for a new house imposed a type of geometry on my field of vision where earth and sky were bracketed by angles and planes. The smell of new lumber mingled with the smell of earth. These early experiences influenced my art and process.”

Ironically, when Susan moved to Detroit as an adult in the early 1980′s, just as many open fields existed in the city as did in her childhood landscape. And much like her youthful experience, wild pheasants were seen on deserted roads and steam vaporized from lone sewer holes. While gravity and weather dissolved houses into the earth, nature overwhelmed vast plots with trees taking root in the eaves of derelict buildings. These lasting experiences in nature are apparent in the materials and methodologies Campbell uses in Resisting Certainty. Each sod tile is molded by a vacuum-formed plastic container. Campbell grows these in her Detroit studio, tending to them for several months at a time. However, against all good horticulture practice, she allows the grass to become root-bound. By using this process, the underneath is conformed into a near perfect positive, including a symbolic grid.

Up close, the sod tiles are wonderful to explore. Constricted, the roots intricately form a natural weaving in the ribs and crevices. Around the edges, individual tiles softy sweep away like the wheat fields from Campbell’s childhood. In the center of the tiles are raised flat circles. The circle is repeated in the sod tiles left upright. This orientation allows their square-constricted bottoms to become obscured after the long grass has naturally wilted outward. The idea represented here is certainly the cycles of change. It is also the attempt to include green space in urban planning, city parks, and perhaps in the center of all communities. This motif is repeated in smaller, rolled sod tiles.

The type of natural material Campbell cultivates is a grass that, against all odds, finds a home in the rooftops of dilapidated buildings. It is a weed that thrives in the poorest of soil and is able to survive the harshest of weather conditions. We find this type of grass waist-high in a neglected plot of suburbia.

Is this blatant commentary of our attempt to coexist with nature? Or is it a failing attempt to control nature without any regard for sustainability? I don’t think the work is didactic at all. Campbell is using an appropriate symbolic building block, a micro meditation of natural and artificial environment. The work on a whole arouses an emotional response stemming deeply from the environment of our youth.

Susan Goethel Campbell, “Resisting Certainty”
2014, Grand Rapids Art Museum

Resisting Certainty is informed by the constructs of our cultural landscape. Information, by way of data, charts, graphs, and mass-produced construction are distilled into vacillating grounds of synthetic and organic planes, as a large topographical map. Yet, our movement through the installation is graceful, controlled by Campbell’s aesthetic ability. She clearly considers social interaction and bodily movement. At once I felt winged and limberly circling. Discovery was offered at every turn. Detail beckoned attention, banking around and through implied paths of organic and engineered spaces.

“My relationship to landscape has to do with impermanence, change and movement. My earliest influences and emotional epiphanies came from dance rather than visual art. The performances of Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Martha Graham, and Eric Hawkins were visual distillations of the body in time. This spoke to me. The movement was minimal, repetitious and sometimes glacial. In my late 20’s I fell in love with the Butoh dance troupe Sankai Juku. Their reference to the ground plane in their dance led me to consider cycles of renewal and decay in the landscape. This encompasses the built environment.”

Campbell takes tradition and brings it into the current era. Her manipulation of landscape is an elegant form of printmaking. The plastic container is her matrix and every sod tile is a multiple, therefore a document of the container. Campbell earned a master’s degree in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has been awarded printmaking residencies in Belgium and Germany. She also taught studio art for 15 years at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. I think that printmaking is an appropriate adaptation here.

“Throughout my artistic career, I have been interested in process and the intersection of nature and culture. Trained as a printmaker, the idea of recording and transferring marks from one thing to another has shaped how I work and see the world to this day. A line can be formed from an insect chewing on a leaf or a backhoe bulldozing a new road through a forest. Both micro and macro views are visual marks on the landscape…My job is to bring a voice to the material.”

The other works around the perimeter of the exhibit are just as contemplative. InSeasonal Flyers: Spring, Campbell repeats her systems on a much simpler yet still complex level. Tiny individual downy seeds of dandelion are harvested in an attempt to construct a single building block the size of a brick. Presented is a work so tenuous, so delicate that one more dandelion seed would topple it over. Closing in for a micro view, careening overtop to revel at Campbell’s precarious feat, I was most thankful for the protecting vitrine.

Campbell’s work summons reflection of the changing environment around us. Her methodology establishes a mode of interaction between people and landscape that provokes reciprocity, wonder, and gratitude. Perhaps she wants us to encounter her work as we should approach nature—respectfully discovering exactly how all its parts (ourselves included) belong.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/10/landscape-as-process-the-art-of-susan-goethel-campbell/

Tim Powers: Below the Surface, by Robert Sparrow Jones: Michigan Quarterly Review, July, 2014

Michigan Artist, Tim Powers is an unabashed materialist whose work revels in minimalism, but he is not at all resistant to one metaphorical symbol, the pillow. In effect, “Tim Powers: Below the Surface” at the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, is a quiet meditation on the mundane and intimate space of sleep. His source of investigation is the philosophical and existential oppositions that manifest themselves in the industrial materials he uses. The theme of the unconscious is carried through in the ethereal hues inherent to polystyrene and latex that collectively invite the viewer into a meditative space. But what stirs this exhibit are the oppositions Powers designates in the details. They are full of physically engaging contradictions that lure you inside the work. And while dreams themselves remain nameless; a sustaining eternal question about what makes our own landscape lingers.















Powers grew up on the west side of Detroit until he was seven. He is the youngest of four. His father, Daniel Anthony Powers, a graduate of the University of Detroit was a mechanical engineer who designed and manufactured hardware. Along with acquiring several patents, Daniel became president of the thriving Precision Hardware, which manufactured panic and fire exit hardware for over half a century. Precision Hardware was situated along Fort Street near Del Ray, an area cut off from the rest of Detroit by a deeply industrial landscape: the River Rouge and Zug Island. Physically, the company was an amalgam of repurposed buildings they had purchased one after the other in a perfect row, including what was once the local meat market. Each building was referred to by its original owner’s name—Shimmle’s, Dewy’s—and each served a dedicated function of the company: a foundry, inventory, shipping warehouse, a churning machine shop. Tim would spend summers working in front of a drill press and a large bin of parts, manually clamping down and rote drilling. He ate his lunches on the asphalt as the air mixed with the toxins emitted from the Ford Rouge Complex and Wayne Soap—an industrial plant that rendered animal parts.

This geography is evident in “Below the Surface.” The menace of a deeply personal and historical landscape is sometimes right on the surface. There is nothing warm or billowy about these pillow forms. They are made from the cold, hard, and rubbery industrial materials that Powers experiments with. His pillow forms are molded from polystyrene, a material used for uniformity and mass production, into an illusion of softness by manipulating their shapes. Sometimes other materials are used, such as the polished concrete in, Untitled, 2011, concrete and the mix of latex in, Untitled, 2010, polystyrene, latex rubber. A few of pieces, with their insides emerging, are even more evocative.

Untitled, 2011, polystyrene, enameled wire, a white pillow form, is comprised of a bottom shell and top layer. The two forms have a silia-like membrane made up of enameled copper wire that peeks out around the seams between the two surfaces. Texture here suggests movement, magnified and slithering. One can imagine, just as sleep takes us, that the unconscious opens up to release memories. The invading detritus of the mundane becomes horrific. In another work, Untitled 2010, polystyrene, jacketed wire is a pillow form where the seams have opened on one side to reveal a gill-like texture. Because this hinted interior is made of white-coated enamel wire, the texture resembles sinew and offers a subtle, otherworldly breathing. It is inviting, sensual, and frightening.

Especially dramatic are the materials and effects of the pillow form, Untitled 2010, polystyrene, silicone caulk. Here the transparent plastic top layer reveals a spiny rolling landscape of white latex silicon spikes. Powers overtly seduces the viewer with the slickness and the association with the manufactured newness of the object. His contradictions are playful: hard and soft, light and dark. He then repels us with the reminder that here is a pillow. This is where we sleep when our childhood night terrors come back to us as dreams of water, submersion, and sci-fi horror.

Content is played the same way, pulling the seams open of cultural layers to infuse the medium with the realities of where we come from—through the lens of Powers’ own narrative:

“I have an awareness of the complex cooperative dynamics of a place. The factors that make up the unique characteristics of a particular place: the people, the climate, the industry, the culture and heritage, and the natural environment. These are in play in any “place” and are what becomes its personality. The more time there, the greater the awareness, if you are looking. Keen observation forms a connection that sits outside sentimentality. These observational details become the foundation of the emotional connection, the smell of a soap company or lacquer plant, the neon of a neighborhood bar, a draw bridge tower, the ever present litter that collects along a curb in a viaduct, cast iron street lamps, refinery tanks and two story clapboard homes separated by a potholed street.”

Is this personal landscape available to the viewer? I think so. Powers’ personal experience and relationship with his surrounding environment can not only be observed through the visible layers but also through his control and reconstructing of environment. Following the 1967 riots and the stabbing of a neighbor, the Powers family moved to rural Monore. Powers continued to be influenced by Detroit–his father commuted in daily to run Precision Hardware, and Tim worked there during summers and on Saturdays and later, as a part-time employee while he earned his undergraduate degree at the College of Creative Studies–but his work is shaped by the intersections between the rural Monroe and Detroit.

“In a way, the monumentality of Detroit taught me to look ‘up,’ and agrarian Monroe taught me to look ‘down.’ Both environments had a different, but equally wild nature. Each was full of texture, smells, subtle and dynamic colors and awesome vistas.”

“Below the Surface,” speaks to that experience of the diversity of place. I see a connection between identity and the industrial landscape. Powers evidences an unsentimental love for where he comes from rather than rebellion against it. This is where Powers is especially acute. By his devotion to a material and the development of a symbolic figure, he creates an atmosphere where a descent into the unconscious is a collective experience.

Untitled, 2013, polystyrene, provides a perfect example. A large grid of more than 400 somewhat organic white pillow forms takes up an entire wall and a corner of the exhibit. From a distance, the work appears minimal. They are stark white against the softer white of the actual wall. They resemble multiples, which would not be entirely off the mark. Every pillow form began when pulled from a wooden mold that Powers crafted. Then, however, he methodically made each one unique using a heat gun to create the curls, folds and wrinkles that stir the imagination. I like the contrast between appropriating a material used for uniformity and mass production–polystyrene is usually pulled around a mold tens of thousands of units over to create identical forms–and then tailoring the resulting forms.

Because Powers renders each pillow form distinctive, the near-repetition of the installation pieces does not create an impression of uniformity. Rather, it ignites a curiosity about each pillow’s personal identity. The illusion from a distance of movement encourages close examination, which results in deep struggle. You have to resist the temptation to run your fingers across the silky and satin surface of the folds. I imagine the downy insides, and the restlessness of each form takes us to an intimate, interior space: sleep, dreams and then excitement, passion, sleeplessness.

Albrecht Durer’s, pen and brown ink drawing, Six Studies of Pillows, 1493, comes to mind. Durer masterfully depicted folds and wrinkles to evidence the body, and he created adroit likenesses that keenly described life. Powers, however, purposely and less sharply, takes a three-dimensional form and creates a very different effect. Untitled, 2013, polystyrene evidences passive revelation of the act of sleep, lovemaking, violence, despair, and sleeplessness. Instead of rendering material into a representation of direct observation, Powers gives us something interior. The language of wrinkles is somewhat unclear. They are subtle in their shifts. As a symbol, they signify the interior, private experience. This telling mark points to the artist’s interest in materials. The movement and expression, unpredictable and somewhat orchestrated, awakens us to our collective folds of the unconscious.



A final note: before the entrance to the exhibit a molten metal artifact is displayed. It evokes a certain intimacy, resembling something animal, the residue of life lived. Powers notes that he wanted to include this piece because although he didn’t make it himself, it provides context for the items he did make. It is one of many artifacts collected from the floor of Precision Hardware by his late father.

“It broadens the definition of what is art and what constitutes a body of work. It is an item I had no control of its creation, yet supplements the discussion of those that I did. I think the interpretive nature of its form provides an access point for the viewer on a basic level, and also supports my relationship to the specific process I experienced with my new work. It went through a similarly transformative process the polystyrene went through, going from rigid, to pliable, to rigid again and changing form in each step. Like many materials it holds limitless potential forms that lie latent in its current form. It is a state that is only momentarily static. That moment ranging from minutes to eons, but it will change again. It was originally not my thought to realty this to the landscape, but it is certainly an obvious parallel.”

With “Below the Surface,” Tim Powers’ expert capabilities as a maker result in a deeply industrial landscape. Inherent to his materials are the playful subversions possible because of our associations with closeness and escape. We all harbor deep internal landscapes. They are expressed as an amalgam of memories, sweet and dark as entanglements of fossilized metal.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/07/tim-powers-below-the-surface/