Recurring Dreams
Nathan Abels: Recurring Dreams
Rule Gallery
808 Santa Fe Drive, Denver, CO, 80204.
November 18-December 31 2022
Admission: Free
Review by Paloma Jimenez
In Recurring Dreams at Rule Gallery, Nathan Abels applies his cosmic curiosity towards the exploration of environmental narratives that stretch within and beyond human time. From the microscopic detail of a bone’s porous surface to the enormity of a melting ice cap, Abels offers an illuminating new perspective on the climate crisis.
A view of Nathan Abels’ exhibition Recurring Dreams at Rule Gallery. Image by Paloma Jimenez.
Abels’ expansive meandering through fact and reimagined histories is the visual equivalent of reading a W.G. Sebald book; the constraints of chronological time concede to a poetic navigation throughout the epochs. With a light touch, Abels uses the filtered lens of collective and personal memory to create works that hum with the dichotomy between deep time and contemporary urgency. Ursa Major: Re-Imagined offers an alternative reading of the stars that make up the Big Dipper, connecting starpoints into the shape of a wooly mammoth. The drawing also functions as a map for reading the hazy outline of a mammoth in the night sky of In Illo Tempore (In that time / before recorded history), implying that what we may perceive as fixed ideas have the potential to shift and evolve.
Nathan Abels, There is No Death (Echoes), 2022, graphite on paper with ephemera on cork, 33.5 x 44.25 inches. Image by Paloma Jimenez.
At first glance, There is No Death (Echoes) could be a forgotten bulletin board in a college geology department. Abels pins detailed graphite drawings next to clippings from books and a photograph of people waving into an icy body of water. The cork bears the ghosts of ephemera past. Warmth and cold, death and life, are posted for communal distribution—an open invitation to consider the human role in material realities that will exist beyond us.
Nathan Abels, Beginnings, 2022, oil on canvas with oak frame, Paleolithic tool, brass mount, 12 x 24 x 2 inches. Image by Paloma Jimenez.
Nathan Abels, Equinox, 2022, glass cast from Paleolithic tool, paleolithic tool (stone), and steel pedestal, 43 x 20 x 20 inches. Image by Paloma Jimenez.
Beginnings and Equinox explore the time period of the Paleolithic when hominini began to use stone tools. Using actual geological artifacts, the pieces become a collaborative effort between the artist and the makers that came before him. In Equinox, the immediacy of a handheld tool collides with the ungraspable stories held within the vast skies. For Abels, the distant murmurs of bygone ages are worth turning an ear towards.
Nathan Abels, As Above, So Below, 2022, acrylic on canvas, with wooly mammoth tooth, cement pedestal, and sand, 66 x 20 x 20 inches. Image by Paloma Jimenez.
In As Above, So Below we confront a recontextualized mammoth tooth from the Pleistocene era embedded in a cement pedestal. The painting above it presents the tooth in subtle shifts of gray, recalling Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon. Monumental happenings from different eras collide to establish a new material order.
Nathan Abels, Former Ghost (Silene Stenophylla), 2022, oil on linen, 30 x 48 inches. Image by Paloma Jimenez.
Other works catapult us into futures where science is used to combat mass extinction. In Former Ghost (Silene Stenophylla), Abels portrays a plant grown in a lab using seeds from 30,000 years ago. Preserved by permafrost, scientists were able to resurrect an ancient genepool. Despite the potentially foreboding subject matter, the encased plant is painted with profound tenderness and insistent wonder, prevailing over the easier path of nihilism. Humans are not the Earth’s antagonists but a part of its larger story, it seems to say. Can a deep curiosity for the past save the future?
Recurring Dreams is ambitious in its conceptual scope and usage of materials, but maintains an intimacy through sustained observation. Nathan Abels harnesses the hovering tension between the ongoing tragedy of our warming Earth and the sublimity of life’s persistence.
Paloma Jimenez is an artist, writer, and teacher. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and has been featured in international publications. She received her BA from Vassar College and her MFA from Parsons School of Design.
