We have water on our minds. Right now water is an ominous thought. Tsunami. Flooding. Another Tsunami. Flooding and more flooding. Now, water is a threat. But it is also essential for all life, so much so that the early Greek philosopher Thales said “water is the foundation of everything” and he meant it literally, theorizing that earthquakes were caused by waves on the ocean on which the Earth floated. Thales was a hylozoist. He believed matter was alive, so the water which stood as the world’s foundation was not merely an inanimate object. It moved with purpose. He would have appreciated Lisa M. Robinson’s Oceana. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes immediately came to mind when I first saw Robinson’s work. Sugimoto’s gray bisected images show hardly a difference between ocean and sky but for the shift from light to dark at the horizon line. I naively attribute some sense of color field painting to them and I transferred that expectation to Robinson’s seemingly similar pictures. Upon further reflection, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Whereas I see Sugimoto’s seascapes as generic types, a stand-in for the idea of horizon, Robinson has made specific seas. Slow or fast, these waters are alive. They are active and purposeful. You can feel the cold gripping you. In images like “Etching” (above) the ice sheets pile up like whitecap waves frozen in time, stabbing in the winter air. In others, the black-green of deep ocean water signals the vastness and terror of what is beneath. And there is movement. These are roiling seas, perhaps a picture into the past when the world simply existed and humanity was millions of years yet to come.
Lisa M. Robinson, “Oceana”
Through June 10 at Klompching Gallery
111 Front St, Suite 206
Brooklyn, NY
(212) 796 2070
