Selected Catalog Essays

All This Land  
exhibition wall text

Chicago Academy of Sciences, Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2018-19

- Andrew Young. artist

Andrew Young: All This Land  
 
For over three decades, Andrew Young has created art that presents nature as a reference point for human aspirations, worldly and spiritual. His earlier tempera works grappled with our natural desire for ethereal and transcendent experience, yet constrained by such temporal matters as history and mortality. The next phase in Young’s work more clearly reflected his background in science. Carefully constructed collages explored how we observe and catalog our surroundings, defining us through the models and language we use. A new direction here goes further into the physical aspect of art making; specific sources of pigments, their collection and processing, carry as much meaning as any imagery found or invented. The material itself grounds us to a living or geological occurrence, and to a place.
 
Today, we are at an inflection point in our relationship to the landscape. No matter if one’s perception of nature is romantic, aesthetic, or purely utilitarian, dramatic change is underway. All This Land is a paradoxical title for a show that uses a little humor, theater, abstraction, and a ton of recovered objects to address a more somber awareness that the Earth’s fragile systems and resources, despite some current beliefs and tendencies, are not inexhaustible.
    Gallery entrance signage designed by Tara Preston.
                 Cartoon Box Trap (Kill the Wabbit)
    Disassembled and reassembled cardboard shipping container,         hand- printed wood grain on rice paper, found cryptobiotic soil pigment  (Utah), ashwood stick, and raw jute twine, 10.5 x 18 x 8 in.
In 1957, the classic Merrie Melodies cartoon What’s Opera, Doc? debuted, featuring the familiar characters Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. Set to Wagner, the plot of this musical comedy contains all of the conflict and chase standard to the series. However, in a rare turn after so many attempts, Fudd actually catches Bugs and appears to have killed him. Holding the lifeless body, Elmer’s triumph turns to grief as he tearfully carries him off, showing remorse for having finally destroyed the thing he loved most.​
                         Horizons (Boundaries) 1
     Found pigments (from Colorado and Arizona) on incised
              and stained museum board, 22.25 x 22.25 in. 
                         Horizons (Boundaries) 2 
        Found pigments (from Utah and Kansas) on incised
              and stained museum board, 22.25 x 22.25 in. 
The Horizons series is made from sedimentary pigments deposited when water covered the middle of North America millions of years ago. In form, the artworks seem to suggest a horizon where earth meets sky, effectively a landscape by design, but this perception is belied by the physicality of the material and the liquid gesture of its application. At each source of the pigments, water and silts once buried ancient organisms that are now preserved as fossils. When collected, double bags protect the harvested sediments before they are brought home, washed, sifted, and ground into a desirable grain size. In the process, the fossils are separated out and water is mixed with the residue pigments, becoming the vehicle for a new presentation. These paintings are elemental… as much atmosphere as they are earth.
Houseplants and rock walls bring nature safely indoors. In this particularly futile attempt to replicate nature, there is no real original. Instead, the pieces were re-sculpted and painted side-by-side, mirroring one another with deliberate, imperfect execution. Subtle variation is built in as nod to our flawed ability at successfully copying anything. Similar to the exaggeration of form in a theatrical stage set, these lightweight “twins” were fashioned to read as stone, though far from it. Like lost memories or instincts, they are double-vision apparitions of nature.
                             Equivalents (or The Weight of Things)
Two early-1970s, cast and kiln-fired fake “rocks” (for interior wall decoration),
newly chiseled, filed, and repainted to appear nearly identical, 11 x 22 x 5 in.  
                        The Beginnings of All Things are Small 
                Hand-ground watercolor and raw mineral pigment
                       rub on museum board, 15.5 x 15.25 in.
​Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC) is widely considered one of Rome’s greatest orators and prose stylists. He was a philosopher, lawyer, political theorist, constitutionalist, and general “scholar of meaning,” and many quotations have been attributed to him that circulate even today. Here, the formality and authority of the Latin language, enhanced by the awkward calligraphy and pretentious-looking plaque, are contrasted by the very truth of the statement: that everything has a small beginning. Humility and empathy are desirable (and often invisible) components to any important progress.
Since prehistory, humankind has found earthly images in the night sky, assigning names and tracing figures among the stars and planets that provide stories of our origins and other mythology. These apparent patterns of alignment between stars set so far apart are drawn entirely from the perspective of this planet’s position in space. In this way, the infinite darkness becomes a screen upon which we project our human experiences and provides a calendar and map for understanding what we don’t really know. Ancient astrologers looked to the heavens for clues to future events, which provided a foundation for scientific astronomy later on. In these artworks, the organization of the dots is meant to reference our instincts to create systems, but the floral forms carry us back to something much more essential about life, less grandiose, and far older than the human story.​​
                                  Constellation 1 
         Coal dust, crushed freshwater mussel shells, zinc-white         pigment, and gum arabic on museum board, 20.75 x 14.5 in. 
                              Constellation 2          
​     Coal dust, crushed freshwater mussel shells, zinc-white        pigment, and gum arabic on museum board, 20.75 x 14.5 in
In 2015, Silverton, Colorado experienced an environmental disaster when its abandoned Gold King Mine released three million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Animas and San Juan Rivers. An earlier attempt to mitigate pollutants from the closed mine inadvertently destroyed the plug and released the liquid tailings that were trapped inside. Heavy metals and toxic elements, including cadmium, lead, arsenic, beryllium, zinc, iron, and copper, coursed into the waterways of municipalities in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, as well as the Navajo Nation. Acid mine drainage is a problem common to the mining areas of Colorado, harming riparian ecology as well as livestock and agriculture along the water system. Prior to the spill, the Upper Animas water basin had already become devoid of fish because of mining contaminants. Other plant and animal species were also adversely affected. The sumptuous orange color cakes the river stones below the spill for miles. Like an artery to the land, waterways move things. They can replenish, and they can poison. ​
         Collecting mineral pigments in Silverton
                                                                                      The River (Migrations) 
                         Water-tumbled “glacial erratic” stones encrusted with toxic mining sludge (Colorado), 6 x 26 x 14 in.
          I Own Nothing (Thoreau Practices His Autograph)       
            Hand-drawn writing paper, antique wallpaper,
               quill-penned sepia ink, and fifty-seven and a
                   half forged signatures, 15.25 x 11.25 in. 
This small collage is a direct reaction to the merchandising of Henry David Thoreau products (T-shirts, mugs, stamps, and keychains), often with just his signature emblazoned on them, and the conundrum of what he strived for versus how he is remembered. Perhaps best known for his book, Walden, which reflected on simple living in a natural setting, Thoreau’s work is as much about society and a more humane coexistence with one another as it is about surviving an austere and solitary life in the elements. The artwork is a somewhat humorous commentary on the notion of celebrity, and perhaps Thoreau’s coming to terms with it, away from the substance and directive of his writings which we sadly sooner forgot.
This image resembles a cyanotype by its blue coloration and flattened, one-to-one form ratio. Also called “blueprinting,” the cyanotype technique is a kind of contact print, and is the oldest non-silver photographic process where a UV light source (such as the sun) is used as the developing or fixative agent. In this piece, the process is an inversion of the exposure and image-production of a cyanotype. Mineral pigments are rubbed into a layered, physically built-up surface, dark to light. It is a hands-on attempt to get at something as fragile as life and as ephemeral as light. The modesty and starkness of the plant form is as elusive as it is luminous. ​
                                               Blue 
          Zinc-white gouache and hand-rubbed pigment on
          paper, mounted on museum board, 17.5 x 12.5 in. 
                       Tales of Adventure 
Stacked hardbound fiction and biography books caked in 285-million-year-old, fossiliferous ocean sediments (Kansas), Atlantic dogwinkle snails, and silver nail   polish, 30 x 18 x 15 in.
Geologic strata are a library of time: a natural record, like a book of the Earth. Writing contains curiosity, investigation, findings, and retelling, and it demonstrates the fragility and mutability of knowledge. The written word embodies our experience through language, wrapped around fragments of factual information. Gastropods, like many smaller ocean creatures, are scavengers, predators, and prey. They hide in the interstices of the marine landscape, looking for food and avoiding dangers around. Forces of nature sometimes generate burial events that over time preserve the shells and skeletons of the animals that lived there. Like truth, they await our discovery, but only if we search for it. 
                                 Numbers, Near and Far 1
                       Collage of hand-painted and abraded papers
                             on museum board, 17.5 x 12.5 in. 
                 Numbers, Near and Far 2
          Collage of hand-painted and abraded papers
                  on museum board, 17.5 x 12.5 in. ​
From the infinitesimal to the astronomical, numbers are used to calculate value or quantity when measurements – even comprehension – by normal human faculties are impossible. Instruments we invent extend our capacity to reach objects and events both close and far away. Everything in between can get a numerical assignment as well, showing identification or a specific order in a series. A museum catalogue, for instance, has a numbering system that denotes a place of origin, a date of acquisition, and perhaps a species name or location in a collection. Numbers in this case are a parallel universe to what is in storage and evoke the natural separation, and sometimes disappearance, of what is painstakingly catalogued.
                                                                                             Harbingers                
                     Two pounds of bituminous coal fragments, industrial canary cages, and Chicago Academy of Sciences/
                               Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum bird specimens ORN-3385 and ORN-1172, 14 x 38 x 15 in.
For much of the 20th century, coal miners brought canaries into the mines as an early-warning system for toxic gases, in particular odorless carbon monoxide. Birds such as canaries are built to take in far more oxygen per breath than other animals their size, which normally lets them fly at altitudes that would make humans ill. Canaries are therefore highly sensitive to toxic gases, and in a coal mine filling with carbon monoxide would become sick or even die before humans would otherwise have noticed the threat.
On a scale larger than the perils of coal mining, the earth today is experiencing dramatic changes, and both flora and fauna are showing symptoms of environmental disruption. There are animals called “sentinel species” that, like canaries in a coal mine, may be more susceptible or have greater exposure to a specific hazard than people in the same environment. Honey bees, fish, and mollusks are examples of such species that give us a sense of what may be coming to our environmental future.
Featured in this installation are the study skins of two Illinois bird species that from some combination of environmental pressures, be they chemical pollutants, habitat destruction, invasive species, or climate change, are disappearing. The Loggerhead Shrike (Lanius ludovicianus) and the Cerulean Warbler (Dendroica cerulean) are presently listed as endangered and threatened, respectively. Both specimens came to the Chicago Academy of Sciences over one hundred years ago and represent the vast number of plants and animals that are vanishing as a consequence of human activity. In recent decades, the rate of loss has been increasing — for some life forms, faster than we can identify or catalog.
                                     Ochre Stratum 
      Mineral pigments (fossil strata of Utah) and found text
        (index of North American Carboniferous brachiopod                     literature) on museum board,  20.75 x 15.25 in. 
                          Shadow Stratum (Solitude)
           Coal dust, soot, sepia and white ink on museum                   board (transcript from Thoreau’s Walden), 20.75 x 14.5 in. 
                            A Stratum of Flint  
     Lead oxide slurry and rust, with crushed freshwater                  mussel shells, and hand-painted papers on
                     museum board, 20.5 x 17.25 in. 
The raw mineral pigments in the Stratum series are all sedimentary in nature. They were harvested in the field from sites where horizontal bands are distinct from one another by age, color, texture, and/or chemistry. These localities include road cuts, cliffs, quarries, and riverbanks, with each seam representing a different geological event. The term “stratum” by definition includes a rock layer or series of layers in the ground, but it can also refer to a level or class to which people are designated according to their social status, income, or education. Flint as a stone has a somewhat mysterious origin, but it has been used over the ages for tools and weaponry. Flint is also the name of a city in Michigan where the residential water supply has been contaminated by dangerous levels of lead, a problem which is still unresolved.
                                  Work Clothes   
 Decayed late-1800s coal-mining artifacts (Braceville, Illinois),       folded cotton shirt and pants soaked in burnt, oxidized                             shale overburden, 31 x 20.5 x 10 in.
In the nineteenth century, most coal mining in the U.S. was done with slope tunnels and underground shafts that produced enormous surface spoil piles often reaching 100 feet in height. The coal content of this waste could spontaneously ignite when exposed to oxygen without sufficient ventilation for cooling, resulting in smoldering man-made hills that burned for years, if not decades. The explosive volatility of coal, its airborne dust and other gases, was surpassed in danger by the effects of “black damp” (a suffocating mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen that built up in the mine).  This artwork incorporates the tools and garments of labor with the residue of fire and oxidation over time: a memory of our work.
​​Invented floral forms arranged in a grid as if in a specimen drawer, this composition is designed to balance similarities within a “species” with subtle variations and the factors that affect those differences. To count them is to suggest a catalogue or system of organization: safe storage for study. At best, our tally is inaccurate, but it gives us a language through which to address our humble flower and place it in a larger evolutionary context. Names and numbers leash nature to our intellect.
                                                                     Forty Leaves and Droplets  
                                                            Hand-ground watercolor with an unknown Czech artist’s
                                                                   diary text, on museum board, 20.75 x 14.25 in. 
                                                 Elixir
   Clear wine bottle and cork, gold-painted Atlantic barnacles, white
      ink, ocean sediments, and 30-weight engine oil, 13 x 4 x 4 in. 
An “elixir” is a liquid preparation originally used in the Middle Ages by alchemists who believed it was magically able to turn metals into gold. Later, the name was used for mixtures said to prolong one’s life or anything thought to remedy ills or other difficulties. Today, petroleum and its refined components are critical resources in the modern global economy. Stemming from ancient fossilized zooplankton and algae, crude oil is organic, not mineral. It is our dependency, an elixir to our functioning.
                                    Coal Drawing 1           
​      Ground coal and freshwater mussel shells in gum arabic,
           zinc white, on soot-stained paper, 21.5 x 15.25 in. 
                               Deborah Lovely Collection.
                                     Coal Drawing 2           
​       Ground coal, rust, and freshwater mussel shells in gum
      arabic, zinc white, on soot-stained paper, 21.5 x 15.25 in.
                                                                                          Coal Drawing 3           
​                                                           Ground coal and freshwater mussel shells in gum arabic,
                                                               zinc white, on soot-stained paper, 21.5 x 15.25 in.
During the Carboniferous Period (roughly 300 million years ago) northeastern Illinois was tropical, equatorial, and covered in a vast swamp forest bounded by a brackish bay to the south. Periodic flooding events buried the accumulated plant material which, over time – by heat, pressure, and biological processes – turned to coal. In the 19th century, a major industry developed around the extraction of coal, a resource that has been used for energy to this day, increasing worldwide every year. In the mining process, the landscape is ravaged and the atmospheric effects from coal burning have now reached to a level of global emergency. This series of drawings uses coal, the residue of its burning, and calcium carbonate derived from mollusk shells in a poetic attempt to reference and resurrect the life forms critical to our ecology that are overlooked when we utilize naturally stored energy, be it measured in food calories or BTUs.
​                                                                                           Actual Size 
                                                Hand-painted papers with five-gallon bucket silhouette made of pure
​                                                       cadmium orange pigment on museum board, 22.5 x 22.5 in. 
​On August 5th, 2015, when the Colorado Gold King Mine clean-up effort resulted in an accidental release of three million gallons of toxic wastewater, six heavy metals were above limits allowed by authorities for domestic water usage. Some of the metals were hundreds of times their limits, which resulted in the closure of the Animas River for recreation, the prevention of drinking from nearby wells, a warning about contact from pets or livestock, and a caution regarding the consumption of fish. Downstream, the Navajo Nation suffered devastating effects. Cadmium is one of those metals. Prolonged contact with the metal can cause severe pain in the spine and joints, coughing, anemia and, in a case of advanced poisoning, kidney failure and death. Cadmium was once a common industrial ingredient mostly used in coloring plastics and toy manufacturing, until its toxic effects were known. It has also been used in rechargeable batteries. It is still a major component of mining waste. Pictured is a scale drawing of a five-gallon bucket. The Silverton, Colorado spill was 600,000 times that. This is not the first or last of such “accidents.” Safety and precautions about mining today are being minimized, if not altogether eliminated. What will that foretell?
 
On a personal note, dozens of orange plastic buckets populate my garage and porch. To channel Winnie the Pooh’s birthday gift to Eeyore, they are the universal “Useful Pot” that you can use “to put things in.” Mine happen to contain unopened fossil stones that will either become museum specimens or pigment sources for paintings sometime down the road.   
                                                                                                                    - Andrew Young
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