Jon Rappleye: In Tangled Splendor

Jon Rappleye

In Tangled Splendor

Jon Rappleye

In Tangled Splendor

Jon Rappleye

In Tangled Splendor May 9 – June 29, 2014

Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

Super Nature, 2007

Jon Rappleye’s Re-Emergent Planet

by Jan Garden Castro

W

here does art come from? Jon Rappleye’s outsider visions seem to come from his whole being—from his child self, from his life experiences, and from the sun and clouds streaming into his windowed art studio. Rappleye’s windows face the Loew’s movie palace, a hulking 1920s landmark in Jersey City, New Jersey. His art creates its own theater, and today’s feature takes us to a dystopic planet filled with animals whose actions offer cautionary tales.

The large-screen images in this exhibition shift and mutate the world as we know it. This Peaceable Kingdom is in pieces. Rappleye began this series in 2005 by picturing a half-burnt-out computer without an operator trolling its damaged databases and attempting to reconstruct its lost planet.

The digital world has collapsed. One primitive, wounded machine is splicing together a new order, inadvertently mixing up its data ports, plugs, wires, signs, images, and scenes. We can see holes for data ports in some tree shapes; here and there an umbilical-like cord connects a tree or an owl to a black box representing the computer’s memory. Black and white shapes that sometimes suggest trees, biomorphic forms, and groundcover seem constructed from wrapped shredded paper—possibly shredded secret documents. Tree forms dominate each composition yet are as helpless as ghosts, mummies, or embryos. Just as trees and water are used to make paper pulp in our world, in this world the computer has taught paper how to form new trees. Black slits between the paper strips could be eyes or holes where eyes used to be.

Double Psychic Nature and Super Nature, two black and white paintings, reveal the beginning of this series. The black box in each composition is the creator of this new universe. The biomorphic

forms seem both human and tree-like, and owl guardians are starting to emerge. The profusion of stars, the impression of light emerging from darkness, and the mysterious and non-representational forms all suggest original creation. Serene in Spring’s Treacherous Cradle and Wherein this Land of Lively Beast Scatters the Darkness Thin present tender renderings of an antlered buck with its fawn and deer families at peace in a forest populated with animals from other habitats. In Wherein this Night the Beast Does Dwell, we see a central tree form filled with bats, an armadillo, an owl, a beehive.

In 2007 the artist began painting the background to create a brighter, more atmospheric space.

Animal and nature shapes are still black and white yet seem closest to being alive. They are constructed with attention to fine details: their hair, feathers, wings, scales, skin, and other anatomical parts seem most developed and animated compared to the rest of the scene. However, they seem to have genetic mutations. Some birds have multiple heads; some have necks so long that they become lost in the tangle of tubes and wires and data ports on the ground. One owl has antlers that bristle like TV antennae. One creature has a frog’s body, a double set of bird wings, and an owl’s head. The animals repose in smoky orange and blue and green atmospheres that appear hallucinogenic. Ironically, the air seems “hot” or toxic while the landscape seems “cold” or sterile. Some distant vistas evoke the yawning craters and precipitous cliffs of Rappleye’s native Utah in a past or future ice age.

Sculpture completes the panorama of reviving nature: white ceramic owls with hollow eyes and a variety of dead birds made from vitreous china are further symbols of the tenuous differences between nonexistence and existence. Their cold surfaces are smooth, firm, nearly alive.

Owls with star eyes are the artist’s signature—sentries watching viewers, watching the reconstruction, watching worlds beyond sight. Their star eyes are blank, but they emit and gather light.

Sometimes they cluster together. Most animals are peaceful. A mix of animals whose natural habitats would normally be field, forest, swamp, desert, or cave settings now find themselves thrown together and peaceful: deer, peacocks, a monkey, an armadillo, swans, birds, snakes, hares, and bats. The closest we get to confrontation is a swan hissing at a snake as a hare hops over its elongated body. Mushrooms, fungi on the trees, snakes, and phallic mounds are signs of decay and temptation. We should praise the lonely computer which is attempting to create its own context—a new world, to bring back the planet’s gentler nature and creatures.

Adorned in Nature’s Splendid Grace swirls us into a central story of birds and animals in an ascending order precariously perched on a tree that seems to be both dying and stretching to infinity. The tree limbs, the necks and torsos of the animals, and the crossing of lines in every direction suggest congruence and dispersion. Another hint that many contrasting things are happening

Serene in Spring’s Treacherous Cradle, 2009

Adorned in Nature’s Splendid Grace, 2009

simultaneously is that we see a sun in the lower left, a rainbow center right, and a crescent moon in the upper right. Lines that shift and distort vision come on strong in In the Tremble this Nature Abounds. The animal and nature forms are mystical and suggest things we don’t recognize or subconscious or unconscious thoughts. A snakelike tube in the lower right is connected to a tree—possibly the memory box is teleporting the tree into existence. Rappleye’s artifice is original, compelling, and loaded with hidden allusions and messages. As the artist told me, “The root of the idea for this work came from Joseph Stella’s Tree of My Life (1877–1946, painted 1920). I have been influenced by Stella’s strange, sometimes religious nature paintings.”1 Tree of My Life is a lush garden setting with a mystical tree in its center. An orb of sparkling light rests in a top bower.

In this way, Rappleye began his own tree of life as a parable for our postmodern world.

In addition to Joseph Stella, the works in the exhibition In Tangled Splendor reflect diverse antecedents. One is the Peaceable Kingdom of Edward Hicks (1780-1849), which paired children and animals, and placed peace and inner light over ego and ambition, violence and greed. As a child, Rappleye watched Sid and Marty Krofft’s low budget TV programs—the stylized puppets in H. R. Pufnstuf, originating in 1969, and the campy effects in Land of the Lost, a 1974 TV series. These shows featured obvious artifice and somewhat dark themes. Bigger dystopias or anti-utopias are seen in Margaret Atwood’s novels such as Oryx and Crake and The Handmaid’s Tale, in the portent-filled art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569) and in the sometimes nightmarish art of Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516).

Rappleye’s Awakened from Winter’s Tranquil Slumber has a greenish-blue sky and snow in the trees that alludes, specifically, to the sky and snow in Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565), an oil-on-wood painting of a winter scene in a remote mountain village. Yet there are no hunters and no village here—only a skull lying near the crawling snake, in a human bone, and in eyes scattered here and there. It seems that humans have been silenced by their own acts of destruction.

In a nest high in a tree, fuzzy baby owls are guarded by a protective elder.

The artist developed his meticulous painting techniques on his own following studies at Utah State University and graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Rappleye’s art-making process is complex. As he explained: After graduate school, I began experimenting with different ways of working—sort of unlearning what I had learned academically. I work in acrylic and spray paint on paper. I use acrylic paint like a drawing medium; the paint is diluted and brushed across the surface of the paper building up value to construct a realistic image, much like using charcoal or pencil. The 1

Email from Rappleye on April 9, 2014.

background is loosely-applied acrylic color. I then mask out all the areas that were delicately painted in black and white leaving only the colored areas exposed. For the final layers, I use spray paint in a variety of colors to blend and create a deep atmospheric space.2 The resulting paintings’ charged surfaces intermix black and white with layers of color. One interesting effect is that the multi-hued leaves and flowers are all transparent, emphasizing their fragility, and perhaps hinting at consequences of climate change.

Rappleye’s vision has real antecedents: genetically modified organisms, species extinction studies, freakish weather and natural disasters of recent years, along with climate studies, such as a new UN report stating that declining crop yields, drought, heat waves, floods, and food shortages “will worsen quickly if we don’t take immediate action.”3 Rather than portray biblical or recent disasters, his graceful lines, layers of visual data, mix of painting, drawing, color and black and white, and his kind creatures tell stories as pointed as those of Edward Hicks. If animal families from diverse former habitats can get along, we can, too. If polluted environments can regenerate, our endangered planet and species may survive.

Jan Garden Castro (www.jancastro.com) is the author of The Art & Life of Georgia O’Keeffe, Sonia Delaunay: La Moderne, and The Last Frontier. She is Contributing Editor at Sculpture Magazine, and her “In the Studio” blog is featured at www.sculpture.org.

2 3

Studio visit with artist on March 26, 2014.

See http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/closing-window-action-climate-change-offers-consequences-opportunity/

Night, 2009

Forgotten Planet, 2009

Astounding in Infinite Awe and Wonder, 2010

Double Psychic Nature, 2003

From this Ancient Forest Blight, 2008

Guardian, 2007

In the Tremble this Nature Abounds, 2007

Wherein this Night the Beast Does Dwell, 2009

Ghost Birds, 2007

Wherein this Land of Lively Beast Scatters the Darkness Thin, 2009

Awakened from Winter’s Tranquil Slumber, 2009

Bird and Hare Drink Where Flows the Venomous Nectar, 2005

Exhibition Checklist Adorned in Nature’s Splendid Grace, 2009 Acrylic and spray enamel on paper 58 x 40 inches

Astounding in Infinite Awe and Wonder, 2010

Acrylic and spray enamel on paper mounted on wood panel 42 x 38 inches

Awakened from Winter’s Tranquil Slumber, 2009 Acrylic and spray enamel on paper 51 x 51 inches

Guardian, 2007

Slip cast vitreous china Edition of 9 19 x 19 x 16 inches

In the Tremble this Nature Abounds, 2007 Acrylic and spray enamel on paper 52 x 40 inches

Night, 2009

Slip cast vitreous china 37 x 41 x 10 inches

Bird and Hare Drink Where Flows the Venomous Nectar, 2005

Serene in Spring’s Treacherous Cradle, 2009

Double Psychic Nature, 2003

Super Nature, 2007

Forgotten Planet, 2009

Wherein this Land of Lively Beast Scatters the Darkness Thin, 2009

Acrylic and spray enamel on paper 50 x 36 inches

Acrylic and spray enamel on paper 56 x 42 inches

Acrylic and spray enamel on paper 39 x 57 inches

From this Ancient Forest Blight, 2008

Acrylic and spray enamel on paper 42 x 60 inches

Ghost Birds, 2007

Slip cast vitreous china Edition of 10 Dimensions variable

Acrylic and spray enamel on paper 52 x 40 inches

Acrylic and spray enamel on paper 52 x 36 inches

Acrylic and spray enamel on paper 42 x 72 inches

Wherein this Night the Beast Does Dwell, 2009 Acrylic and spray enamel on paper 48 x 42½ inches

Jon Rappleye Jon Rappleye’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York; Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles; The John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Clough Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, Memphis; the Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas; and the Jersey City Museum, New Jersey. His work is featured in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; The Progressive Corporation, Ohio; West Collection, Pennsylvania and U. S. Art in Embassies. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and has been an artist in residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; MacDowell Colony; the Headlands Center for the Arts and John Michael Kohler Arts Center, among other venues. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

He lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Acknowledgments The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey is proud to present Jon Rappleye: In Tangled Splendor. Mr. Rappleye is a New Jersey resident and artist whose work has been simultaneously lauded by Brendan Carroll (Jersey City Independent, 2011) as “fantastic and fairytale-like” and at the same time “suspenseful as if something horrifying were to occur.”

His works are dense with imaginative beings suggesting epic conflicts between chaos and order. This show offers something for the whole family to explore and will undoubtedly stimulate debate and discussion among groups of all ages.

In Tangled Splendor is made possible through the visionary work of the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey’s Curator Mary Birmingham, who consistently presents work that stimulates, provokes, and fosters a deeper awareness of the world and ourselves. I am grateful to Mr. Rappleye for lending his work to the Art Center and to Jan Garden Castro for her luminous narrative on Mr. Rappleye’s work. I would also like to thank our Exhibitions Manager Katherine Murdock, Exhibitions Registrar Justin Hall, Design & Publications Manager Kristin Maizenaski, and my entire staff for their hard work and commitment to all that we do. I extend my special gratitude to our Board of Trustees and the newly-launched Exhibition Support Team for their generous support.

Derek K. Mithaug Executive Director

Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

68 Elm Street, Summit, NJ 07901 • 908.273.9121 • www.artcenternj.org

Gallery Hours

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday & Friday: 10 am – 5 pm Thursday: 10 am – 8 pm Saturday & Sunday: 11 am – 4 pm Major support for the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey is provided in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wilf Family Foundations, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The Horizon Foundation of New Jersey, the WJS Foundation, and Art Center members and donors. Additional support is also provided by the Art Center’s Exhibition Support Team: Helaine & John Winer and Elisa & Louis Zachary.

Design by Kristin Maizenaski Printed by Prestige Color Š 2014, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey ISBN: 978-0-925915-47-4