Imaginary Nature, Sara Roberts
Automata, 504 Chung King Court, Los Angeles, CA, November 18-29, daily 3-8 pm (except Thanksgiving).
Sara Roberts’ installation in the single room of Automata’s Chinatown space is artfully organized according to distinct types of artifacts: hand-mended leaves and fronds, microbe decorated china, reimagined ceramic animals, a panoply of (un)imaginable planets, and in the corner, two cloth-based soft sculptures bedecked with ceramic scales and protrusions. A sound piece plays intermittent squeaks and sighs, fragments and figments of not-quite-music befitting the slightly supernatural atmosphere. Each of the different bits in the exhibit complements the other while expanding the framing theme, Imaginary Nature.
Sara Roberts, Mended palm frond, courtesy of the artist
Among the pieces on display, a collection of carefully mended palm (and other) leaves are the most immediately striking. Using various kinds of thread—rayon, silk, even some that appear metallic by virtue of their sheen—and actual copper wire, Roberts weaves patches across the broken fibers of the palms. The scale of the weaving is small, even minute. Roberts provided a magnifying glass to aid the viewer in seeing the sewing on the patches. The design of each weave is customized to match the pattern in the vegetation. One long wing-shaped piece has light tufts threaded through, extending the long sweep of the fibers in the leaves. Another contains neatly knotted patterns in an irregular grid, patching a whole where the plant surface was frayed. In each instance, the artist’s intervention calls attention to the specific features of the natural object. The aesthetic thoughtfulness of these pieces is compelling in their craft and care. One cannot mend a plant without engaging with it intimately, holding a threaded needle at just the right angle to engage. Though slightly obsessive, the mending works are not the least bit fussy. Looking at them almost feels like discovering the record of a secret tribe of tiny forest workers who have left behind this evidence of their handiwork.
Sara Roberts, Decorated plates, courtesy of the artist
The china dishware decorated with microbes is more humorous. One can only imagine the entries in the wedding registry for such things. Paramecium caudatum for the salad plates, dear? Maybe Covid-19 or Sars on the soup tureen? How to choose between one microbe and another when considering one’s dinner service? These are hard choices, but the slow reveal of a dark plate-sized amoeba beneath the chicken and rice may not have universal appeal, no matter how adorable they are.
Imaginary planets, however, are hard to resist. With their varied surfaces and paint-jobs, glitter and glamour, these globes exert a fascination that invites projection. Who and/or what might live on these remote spheres? Animate and inert, they occupy the liminal space between life and dark. Good to have options to contemplate in these days.
The fantasy animals clustered on a nearby pedestal add their own humorous touch. One wears a bathrobe, another, a grub, lies comfortably asleep on its well-glazed side. They each have a little something extra, or, are missing rather a lot (such as the head of a crow, connected to nothing from the beak down). They, too, cavort with our imagination, small madcap creatures daring us to challenge their authenticity. “Of course I am wearing a crown,” says the proud bird, “who wouldn’t if they could?”
Sara Roberts, Soft sculpture with ceramic elements, courtesy of the artist
In the corner, the two soft-sculpture objects with their elaborate spines and scales are the most organic of the ceramic works. They have the uncanny feel of actual natural objects and respond to the touch. One that might be a thing found in the deep woods, its cap of odd fungi-like soft spines rattling against each other with every movement. The other, stout as a stump or overweight sea cucumber is covered in scales that stop just short of being iridescent. These objects have their artistic lineage. I think of Louise Bourgeois and her command of organic shapes, or of any number of other sculptors who invoke animate existence through the use of body resembling motifs or complexly varied textures. Soft and smart, these would also be beautiful at a larger scale.
The entire exhibit raises interesting questions of scale and how these different works would be perceived at a much greater–or smaller–size. How do we process works of art viscerally? Once something escapes the scope of containment, it becomes radically different in its impact. These are all tame objects, well-contained within that gallery space and our relation to them. But they are each compelling in their own address to the viewer to consider the plight of nature in this moment, and our relation to that. Pay attention, these works say clearly, something needs to be done. Mending the planet will take more than rayon thread and patience, but these works are at least, in their small scale way, a call to that charge.
One final thought, perhaps oblique, is the connection I made with J-K. Huysman’s Against Nature (1884). Though Roberts’s ethics and aesthetics are far from the stance of bored ennui that pours through that decadent novel, something about her interventions reminded me of the hot-house atmosphere invoked in every scene. I was smitten by the book as only a repressed adolescent romantic with dark fantasies could be, ripe for imagining a world of artifice as the only one worth inhabiting. Roberts’ “imaginary” work does not begin with the indulgent ennui, glutted and jaded appetites, and sensual excess that Huysmans heaps on his main character, Des Esseintes. She might even find the link to the 19th century work anathema, but something in the exquisite care with which she details her objects rhymes a bit with the pleasure of excesses in Huysman’s descriptions and the enrichment of ordinary life through baroque invention.
The exhibit is a small gem. Worth the trip to Chinatown and Automata’s (the sponsoring organization) residency space on Chung King Court. A familiar spot to many of us, this tiny enclave of shops and galleries including that of the enduring Charlie James) is where the Poetics Research Bureau also used to occupy a storefront. The intimacy of the pedestrian zone provides a warm welcome as one turns from the active traffic artery of Hill Street. Go if you can.
For more information about the exhibit, see: https://www.sararobertsimaginarynature.com/about
n.b. This brief, slightly-off-cycle posting is prompted by the fact that this exhibit is up for such a short time. If you are to see it, you have to go soon.