Stephanie Dowda DeMer's “Small Suns” Exhibition at Whitespace Gallery

The last election raised so many questions about global warming and the future of the planet that everyone I know has been overwhelmed with worry. Each of us has had to think long and hard about survival strategies, and one common denominator has been reflecting on what really matters in life, and how to stay focused on those things while still being engaged with day-to-day problems of chaos and uncertainty.

Artists addressing climate change and environmental issues didn’t start with the election, of course. But after the election…wow. I know I really felt that I had to find new ways to work—imagery, metaphors, visual language—that could rise to the occasion. For me, this has involved addressing issues indirectly, from an oblique angle, where everything in each painting is informed by events going on outside the painting. This  new work uses the general—bonobos as stand-ins for our better selves, a sense of harmony with nature, a sort of “time-out”  from worry—to allude to the specific: global warming, mass extinctions, societal collapse, and so on. It's a long list.

Small Sun 1, 2024, dye sublimation print on aluminum, 40" x 40", Stephanie Dowda DeMer

Small Sun 3, 2024, dye sublimation print on aluminum, 20" x 20", Stephanie Dowda DeMer

All of this is background to my state of mind when I went to Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta to see Stephanie Dowda DeMer’s recent show, “Small Suns,” and hear her artist’s talk. Right from the start I realized something fascinating: Here was an artist who was addressing environmental issues in her work by using the opposite approach I had been using, but nevertheless addressing the same larger concerns and themes. Her photography and mixed media work “Small Sun 1” and “Small Sun 3” used the specific (restored prairie in Iowa and restored meadow in Georgia) to allude to the general (the importance of all threatened grassland ecosystems). At the same time, Dowda DeMer  layered her imagery and combined mediums in ways that made the works intriguingly dense and beautiful in their own right. It’s a great moment when looking at someone’s work, to realize how thoughtful and smart it is. This was when I decided I wanted to write about the show to reflect on the many similarities, differences, and common reference points between her work and my own.

Closer, 2024, dye sublimation print on aluminum, 50" x 40", Stephanie Dowda DeMer

Small Sun 8, Shimmer, 2024, dye sublimation print on aluminum, 40" x 40", Stephanie Dowda DeMer

Next, Dowda DeMer’s artist’s  talk focused on a large-format, black and white work titled “Closer”; it struck me immediately as so F***ING BEAUTIFUL. I am rarely so powerfully affected seeing a work of art for the first time. The combination of realism and abstraction carried a weight that prompted me to see the tree almost as though I had never seen one before. I also realized the artist’s manipulation and  treatment of the tree image managed to somehow  sidestep any references to the history of nature photography. Quite an achievement.

Interestingly, a fourth work in the show, “Small Sun 8, Shimmer,” had the opposite initial effect on me; it appeared to be a traditional photograph of sunlight on water, taken from an aerial perspective. I have to admit that this first impression was totally wrong. As with all of Dowda DeMer’s work in this show, there was so much more going on. I was startled to notice that ”Shimmer” had a vibrating energy that was otherworldly, in the way Aldous Huxley talked about his experiments with mescaline in his book, The Doors of Perception. With “Shimmer,” it was as though the artist had captured a glimpse of this kind of heightened perception, the kind of experience someone on mescaline might want to hold onto. But by definition, this moment is fleeting, and all we can take with us is the memory of  a transcendent insight where a layer of reality seemed to have been peeled back to reveal another—possibly deeper—reality.

“Shimmer” prompted me to think about another reference point as well: James Turrell’s Roden Crater. This wasn’t a literal comparison, though. It was the idea of artists exploring expressions of ephemerality  and the sublime, and there was an important distinction between her work and Turrell’s- Dowda DeMer’s was firmly grounded in the world, which was actually integral to all of her work, and for a very similar message. I realized that Dowda DeMer was encouraging her viewers to slow down and reflect, and really look at the natural world as she was representing it in her art. In a way,  it seemed  to me that she was encouraging a kind of art-based state of mindfulness in which a viewer could share a  moment suspended in time and  hold onto it—however briefly—and in so doing to grasp what we have and really see it, which, hopefully, might lead us to be more aware of  all that we have to lose.

Death Painting

A number of years ago I was fortunate to be invited to one of the salons at the home of Louise Bourgeois. It was held in her Chelsea row house in a narrow room off the kitchen. Seated at a small table, facing everyone in the room, she engaged in a dialogue with each artist one at a time. I had heard stories about how Louise Bourgeois was brutally honest in her critiques and feedback, but for the most part what I saw was her keen mind and artist’s eye – and her curiosity.

I had asked her guidelines for what to bring, and she said, with matter-of-fact simplicity, “The bigger the better.” I had obliged, and when it was my turn the large painting I had brought had to be moved in from the hallway and balanced precariously on a stool in front of her so she could see it properly. She began by asking questions that focused on the specific, and then built towards the general (and in this case “general” meant the meaning of the painting). Her eyes were like those of a hawk, piercingly observant, missing nothing as she asked about minute details and connected them to the broader whole, prompting me to articulate how I had found what the painting was actually about in the process of creating it. L.B. grew more animated as this process went on, culminating with her exclamation, “…we know through doing!”

Looking back, when my father passed away on Valentine’s day a few years later, L.B.’s succinct statement regarding artistic process (knowing through doing) was more applicable for me than ever; I wanted to make a painting about my father’s death but didn’t have a clear idea at all what such a painting would look like. In fact, I had no idea how to even start such a painting – dealing with the many layers of grievance, the memories of my father and my own life, the mysteries and ineffability of death, was an overwhelming prospect. But the impulse – the need – to make that painting remained.

After some time, I thought of Egon Schiele’s deathbed drawing of Gustav Klimt, his teacher and fellow artist. My father had been an artist, and I realized I could address his death indirectly via Schiele’s image of the deceased Klimt. Next, I posed Emmie, our South African mastiff, backlit at the top of our basement stairs, Janus-like, bright daylight behind her and the dark basement stairs in front. She was as liminal – as “between” – in reality-based space as one can get; this opened up the metaphor I needed to paint about my father’s own liminal state as he shifted from living to dying. The addition of a cast of one of the dead of Pompeii at the top of the door helped insert a timeless sense of pathos I felt when I saw some of them in Italy; the experience was as unknowable as being in the presence of my dead father. Last, I included several graffiti images from Krog Street bridge; adolescent and raw, they added some of the universal immediacy of the human urge to make marks on a surface, something that has been at the heart of art-making since Lascaux and Chauvet.

Paradoxically, in order to achieve the goal of this entire process – which I learned through the actual making of the painting (Bourgeois’ reference to knowing through doing) – I had to undertake a painting that was not literally about my father’s death. As I began the process of making preliminary drawings and color studies, it became clear that the painting needed to be about loss in general, about one of life's guarantees that we tend to not think about: that we all will lose loved ones, and there is no easy way to make sense of it. So, I decided to use an approach that was more vibrant in palette and execution than my preliminary studies; in its final form, the painting had to be as much about the vitality of life as it was about loss, and the bright colors and active brushwork provided the counterpoint I needed to accomplish this: meaning derived from the juxtaposition of opposites.

Grace

When I came out of a major knee operation a couple of years ago, I was on fire about painting. I have no idea why. “On fire” is the closest I can come to describing my state of mind, which was a high-intensity, deep-seated excitement about painting – painting with a capital “P.” This moment signaled a pivotal time for me. I just had no idea what I would be pivoting to.

Finding this out was the hard part, and required patience with uncertainty (something I have never been good at). It also required an openness to ways of generating ideas and the role random chance can play, which is also not a strength of mine. One of the best ways I have always found to do these things is travel. I don’t claim to be original here – it’s just something I seem to forget about on a regular basis. A great reminder that I needed to get out of my day-to-day routine more often was a weekend trip to Memphis for a wedding; while there, we learned that the Memphis zoo has bonobos – the fascinating and rare species of chimpanzee that is even more uncannily similar to humans than the other great apes. Often referred to by primatologists as having a social structure that reflects the best of human nature, I had been hoping to see some in person for years. Several hundred reference photos later, I was so grateful for that day.

Fortunately for me, Nicole took a cue from our Memphis trip and suggested we travel up the east coast, visiting friends and going to sites that seemed to offer promising subject matter for new work. Our trip was planned around several priorities; high on this list was to find and document “witness trees.” The ones I was particularly interested in were from the civil war, and had been alive at the time of the battles of Bull Run and Antietem. Also high on my list were witness trees in Washington D.C. which happened to be American elms, a species of tree I grew up with in Chicago, decimated by Dutch elm disease, a tree “pandemic” that almost eradicated what I believe is one of the most beautiful species of trees in the world.

Throughout this trip I never knew what imagery might serve as the spark that would prove to be pivotal to a new series of paintings: Duke Gardens in Durham, North Carolina; the New York Botanical Garden; the art at Storm King and Dia/Beacon in upstate New York, all got in the mix in unexpected ways. Storm King’s re-wilded meadows, in particular, stayed with me and energized my sense of optimism, as did moments of extreme kindness I witnessed between strangers during our travels.

Taken as a whole, these experiences were remarkably life affirming and stood out in stark contrast to the grim politics and environmental news we read and hear about every day. Witness trees, bonobos, beauty, elm trees, memory, kindness, optimism, lush, dramatic tropical plants - in ways both large and small, all of this became “Grace”.