CMC exhibit taps textures ‘of the Earth’ for display through Aug. 25
By Anna Meyer - July 7, 2023
A visit to “Terrene” is something you can’t unsee — the rocks rasp their geologic tales; the lichen oozes and bursts with life.
Terrene, meaning “of the Earth,” will be on display at the Colorado Mountain College Aspen Gallery until Aug. 25. The exhibit features the work of Mila Rossi and Leah Aegerter, who both make art inspired by the natural world.
“When I started to see it, I couldn’t stop seeing it,” CMC gallery director Lauren Mayer said. “I’ve been seeing their work in the wild. … It brings a keenness in your awareness to the natural world because we’re surrounded by beauty here, and it can be really easy to stop seeing it.”
Both Rossi’s and Aegerter’s work explores the microcosms found in nature. By infusing the physical world with their own touch, the artists project meanings and memories onto their surroundings.
All of the textures featured in Aegerter’s pieces for the show are sampled from the Grand Canyon, where she spent two months during an artist residency.
“I feel a very deep, emotional connection to the textures,” she said. “Working through this long process of translation allows me to spend more time with those rocks and with the sentiments that I experienced when I was in those places.”
She had a particularly poignant encounter with rocks during a three-night, solo backpacking trip along the Nankoweap Creek. Waking up alone in the canyon, she felt as though the Muav Limestone walls of the creek were sentient.
“I felt like I was looking at the skin of The Giant, and that I was in the armpit of the Earth, nestled benevolently,” she said. “It was this really beautiful experience of feeling this rock, which we think of as inanimate, being so alive. There was no doubt in my mind that the rocks have energy to them and go through these extensive life cycles of formation and erosion on a timescale that I can hardly even fathom.”
Aegerter translates her experiences with geologic formations by taking a few hundred photographs of it, then using photogrammetry technology to digitize the textures around her and build a three-dimensional model of it.
“As much as (the sculpture) is about looking to my emotional experiences and those moments, it’s also about looking forward and imagining the future,” she said. “I think that using the digital techniques really kind of contributes to that feeling of futurism.”
Once she has a digital model of the surface, she outputs the model with a 3D printer. Finally, she makes pigmented paper by hand and presses it into the molds to craft her own interpretation of the rocks.
“I want it to be my own composition, and I want to try and tell a story — although I know it’s very abstract — through my work,” she said.
Using different techniques, Rossi also translates personal moments through her art.
“(I’m) taking a small moment that I think is really special and quiet for me that I’ve had with this little bit of nature and making it big and recording it and working through my eyes to create something how I see my experience with that object,” she said.
Her work is influenced by her background in photography. She begins by taking an image of something miniscule that she finds in nature and magnifying it until it is only recognizable as patterns and textures.
“One of the things that really draws me to both (Rossi’s and Aegerter’s) bodies of work is you step in, you step in, closer and closer and closer,” Mayer said. “It’s kind of reminiscent of being in nature.”
While Rossi loves the medium of photography, she said she misses the textural component of her environment. To bring back the texture, she builds on the photograph with paint and other materials, comparing her artistic process to a collage.
“When you’re up close … it looks like crazy marker scratches, but then when you back up, it suddenly becomes like part of this more three-dimensional thing,” she said. “I think that’s the power of this exhibit is (that) we were working so close with these pieces, but they’re so magical when you look at them (from) far away.”
The effect achieved by using the pure landscape captured by photography and embellishing it with technology and whimsy emphasizes the intersection of nature and humanity.
“(Rossi and Aegerter) both insert their own human hand, but they also use digital media, which kind of removes the human hand,” Mayer said. “It’s this very interesting mixture of techniques and the meeting of different sides of art-making and the natural world.”
The undercurrent of the exhibit, according to her, is the concept of the cross-section of the human hand, abstraction, and the natural world.
“Multiple people can have similar guiding principles to what they’re making and the outcome can be so different,” she said. “It’s the beauty of art, that we’re the translators. It’s coming through us, through our body, through our experiences. That translation is the difference in the variety in the work, but the core is the similarity.”
For some of the pieces, Aegerter and Rossi combined forces. Aegerter gave Rossi paper casts that she had no use for, and Rossi repurposed them in her own work to breathe new life into them.
“It’s fun to have the privilege of working with someone else’s piece that they had their hand on and trying to honor that and make them proud and not destroy it,” she said.
Aegerter noted that having Rossi’s more traditionally “alive” organisms next to hers creates a dialogue between the artists’ works and imbues the gallery with the feel of a holistic environment.
“I really love seeing the work all together because I think that both of us talk about these really small micro-moments in nature and honoring an act of noticing and translating that into something new,” she said.
In combination with the artist’s creativity, Aegerter said she hopes to bring an element of surrealism to the gallery space.
“There is kind of this fantastical element to it,” she said. “Like, is this a real thing? Like, how much of this should I believe to be real versus believed to be the artist’s interpretation?”
Throughout the curation process, Mayer said she paid attention to the way the different styles interacted with each other to draw the viewer’s eye to different features of the environment. According to her, viewers will walk away with a renewed appreciation for the world around them.
“I hope people feel reverence for the landscape and can find feelings of calm in my work,” Aegerter said. “For me, they really are born out of a deep communion with the landscape. I would hope that someone could feel a connection themselves or remember a moment when they felt a connection and try and chase that feeling for longer.”
