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Effective January 1: Masks are Optional in VisArts’ Classrooms and Studios
By Claudia Rousseau, Ph.D.
Stretched across a length of seventy feet, at a height of six, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann’s monumental Seed Float is visible to all who pass by VisArt’s 355 POD Space Gallery, a long and narrow vitrine facing Hungerford Drive in downtown Rockville. Illuminated at night, the work can be appreciated at any time of day, but because of a lack of daytime reflections, it may actually be better viewed at night.
As described by the artist, the title refers to a “common gardening seed viability test”.[1] This entails floating seeds in a bowl of water to determine if they are viable. Viable seeds should sink, while seeds that are not will float. “The seed float is an unreliable test for knowing what plants will germinate”, she continued, “but it is a broad way of imagining a future landscape”.
Mann views this, and all her recent work, as a “combination of exploring our physical landscape and environment, referencing landscape picture making in art history, and creating new environments: seeds for future…worlds”. In the middle of that sentence is a key idea: landscape painting in art history, and I would add, specifically referencing the important place of landscape in American art.
It is widely accepted that artists in the nascent United States looked to Europe for what fine art should be. Looking at the Romantic trends in landscape art there, they were dismayed. America didn’t have ancient ruins, Gothic churches, castles and towers, and all the rest of that vocabulary that had become common for these pictures. But what America did have was spectacular landscape on a scale that dwarfed anything in Europe, and much of it still completely pristine. Therefore it should be no surprise that beyond colonial portraits and the like, the first identifiable art movement in America was the loosely grouped Hudson River School led by Thomas Cole and subsequently by Frederic Church, Asher B. Durand and others. Their work stressed the wildness of the land and especially of the weather—huge storms that move into the picture providing a sense of horizontal movement, lightning and viewpoints that stressed the enormity of the land stretched out before them.
To complement this endeavor, the actual scale of the paintings began to grow exponentially. By mid-century Albert Bierstadt had begun to make enormous canvases of the mountains in the West, while Church traveled to South America to find spectacular landscapes that he painted on a matching scale. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the Big Picture was a fixture in American landscape art, and paintings such as Thomas Moran’s huge renderings of the Colorado and Wyoming mountains sold for the equivalent of millions of today’s dollars.
Some years ago I gave a lecture at the Kunsthistorisches Institut at the Freie Universität in Berlin that I titled “The Big Picture” concerning this theme[2]. In it, I brought the tradition into the 20th century in the phenomenon of Abstract Expressionism emerging after World War II. While developments in European, especially French art during the late 19th and early 20th century had attracted international and American adherents, after the war there rose a widespread passion among American artists to create an American style not dependent on European models. And scale was part of this movement. Think of the vast size of Pollock’s floor paintings, and the referencing of American Indian sand painting and other native arts and mythology in work by these painters. Its undeniable American identity was key.
And so, we circle back to Katherine Mann’s Seed Float. At 70 feet in width it exceeds by far the Abstract Expressionists’ canvases as well as the celebrated earlier landscape painters. Nevertheless, in my view, and pictorially, it carries on that deep seated American tradition. Its combination of layered abstract shapes and precise woodcut printed floral designs seems to encompass both aspects of that tradition. Viewing it, a friend and I couldn’t agree on whether the forward movement the work seems to project started from one end or the other. In answer to my question, Mann informed me that she worked from the center outward in both directions, suggesting no beginning or end. Endless expansion—another American idea.
In terms of actual technique, Seed Float is overwhelming in the sheer amount of work evident in its making. It is basically an enormous collage of cut paper, painted with acrylic and drawn with sumi ink, with the addition of streamers and delicate hanging rice paper woodcut printed with a repeating floral design. In some places the abstract shapes and drawn areas coalesce to imply images, for example a sun seems to be shining in the upper center section, with dark gray clouds below it. The two large hanging cut out rice paper elements that are suspended some inches to the front can appear like rain, especially with the streamers on either side. In fact, while viewing it, I thought of Thomas Cole’s Oxbow and of others in his school who featured the incursion or departure of weather systems from one side or another in their compositions, as mentioned above, to emphasize the wildness and variability of the climate. The climate is on all our minds these days, and among the dire effects of its changing are storms unprecedented in decades.
Now, my efforts to locate Mann’s work in this tradition may stem from my art historical training, but I feel that even though the artist might not be aware of this context (although I think she is), it is evident. Her artist’s statement mentioned another aspect of it that paralleled the movement to the “big painting” after WWII—the cinema, especially the rise of the Western movie in the 1950s with its views of the vastness of the prairies and the harshness of the deserts of the western USA.[3] Mann also mentions her bi-racial identity, Chinese and American, as filtered through works like these, and one might imagine Chinese landscape painting on long scrolls and screens as an element in her work. Acknowledging its origins and its originality, Seed Float is an extraordinary work that solicits our attention, engages our vision and encourages contemplation of our place in relation to the world around us.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann: Seed Float, 355 POD Space Gallery (VisArts), 355 Hungerford Dr, Rockville, MD 20850. October 11, 2024-January 19, 2025. VisArts Galleries Director + Curator, Frank McCauley 301.315.8200
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