There is no shortage of artists working along the environment/climate/imperiled nature continuum lately. Some of this work is monumental, massive installations evocative of the scale of the challenges; some is relentless, direct action or poetic cinema employing the language of catastrophe and accusation; some is elegiac and pleading, enshrining the beauty of the natural world; some didactic, drowning in numbers and charts. And some, like the inventive, melancholy, mixed-media works of Brandon Ballengée, speak more quietly, forcing the viewer to lean in and listen closely. And that’s when they really let you know — we have a big problem on our hands.
Beauty, aesthetic appeal, mystery, memory, and even humor are proven strategies when it comes to making people look and listen longer — giving activists a better chance at imparting their message and making it stick. An artist and biologist, Ballengée’s focus is on biodiversity, particularly the impact of deep-sea mining in the Gulf Coast region he calls home. But in his current exhibition, L’Art de la Solitude (The Art of Loneliness), at Jennifer Baahng Gallery, Ballengée leverages art history, popular culture, and symbolically meaningful material mediums to create subtle, affecting embodiments of loss and absence. His paintings and works on paper push back against the dominant narrative of betrayal and erasure that has come to characterize environmental practice in the Anthropocene — by giving tangible form to the void left by extinction.
Ballengée generates a kind of earth-magic, conjuring, collecting, and transforming contaminated samples and related chemicals to create portraits of the missing-in-action species.
The most arresting works — and the ones that are most assertively literal in their methodology — are the cut-paper pieces in the series “Frameworks of Absence.” Each one begins with a vintage illustration of an animal species, the kind you find in rare-book shops and natural history museums, from which a now extinct species of beast, fish, or bird has been painstakingly cut out, its title annotated with “RIP.” At first look, these images are so familiar as to be unremarkable, especially the ubiquitous works of the best-known artists and animals — and then you notice. Some of the most poignant and pointed examples include RIP Audubon’s Bighorn Sheep: After John James Audubon, 1845/2016; RIP Turquoise-throated Puffleg Hummingbird: After John Gould, 1861/2015; RIP Reunion Giant Tortoise: After George Shaw, 1801/2018; and RIP Dodo: After S. Edwards, 1808/2023.
Because of the way the intervened-upon pages are framed, they float, so the fauna-shaped holes cast a shadow onto the wall, giving the image a flickering sense of movement and depth and briefly obscuring the absence, only to give the eventual realization more punch. The penny drops when you realize what you’re actually looking at — or not looking at — or what you’re looking for but cannot see. Did you ever really know what the missing animal looked like? What else, through your actions taken and responsibilities neglected, are you allowing to die? What else have you taken from yourself, and from the future?
And while “Frameworks of Absence” simultaneously enacts a critique of the sort of entitled naturalism characteristic of empire, allied with genuine scientific interest, and of how colonialism inevitably prefigured resource extraction — creating the latter-day geopolitical and industrial conquests from which we currently suffer — the series also includes a couple of cheekier pieces: RIP Zanzibar Leopard: After Rich Buckler & Frank Giacoia, 1973/2023, which removes the literal panther from the Black Panther comic, and RIP Spix’s Macaw: After Tyler Yicker, 2011/2023, which does away with a main character from Disney’s Ice Age.
Like visions from a seance, they are the presence of absence.
Many of these elegiac pieces include an urn containing the ashes of the cut-out figures. These remains bring full circle the sense of loss that Ballengée emphasized in a gallery talk: “Our species is becoming more and more lonely because all the other life is starting to disappear, the biodiversity is really disappearing…. Since I’ve been alive, almost 50 years, more than 40% of the world’s amphibian populations have disappeared … and more than 70% of terrestrial wildlife populations since 1970. So it’s happening very rapidly and it’s hard to catalog.”
Where the cut-out works are global in the scope of their accounted losses, the “Crude Oil Paintings” and “SOS Paintings” both deal more directly with the ecological devastation specific to the Gulf Coast. The Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 added to the ranks of known casualties in Nature, increasing the number of “lost” fish species — creatures that just vanished en masse, with no evidence of a die-off per se, just unexplained disappearance. In “Crude Oil Paintings,” rather than stark removal, Ballengée generates a kind of earth-magic, conjuring, collecting, and transforming contaminated samples and related chemicals to create portraits of these “missing-in-action” species. For example, MIA Spreadfin Skate, 2020, is made with “Deepwater Horizon source crude oil, Taylor/MC20 source crude, contaminated marshland sediment with oil, anaerobic bacteria, iron oxide, and COREXIT 9500A (dispersant).” These ethereal, ancient-looking depictions are like grave rubbings or missing-persons posters — visions from a seance, they are the presence of absence.
The “SOS Paintings” are a Cassandra-like follow-up to this work, warning in the most emotional pieces of the series of the imminent threats posed by the inexplicably ongoing deep-water mining in the Gulf of Mexico. Large-scale depictions of brilliant and terrifying creatures, such as the Gulper Eel, are rendered in mundane materials like bedsheets and house paint. These works are the most fantastical, and in some ways the most literal: Made from emblems of human habits and our toxic consumer products, they reach through imagination both down to the abyss and toward a possible future — one that needs to be avoided at all costs, if we don’t want to be the next species cut out of the picture. ❖
Brandon Ballengée: L’Art de la Solitude (The Art of Loneliness)
Jennifer Baahng Gallery
790 Madison Avenue
Through January 27
Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, author, and curator based in Los Angeles, and is the arts editor at LA Weekly. In 2022, she was awarded a Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism.
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