近距离内射合集

Patrick Kikut鈥檚 post-nature landscapes

Local art lovers might know Patrick Kikut as the owner of No Man鈥檚 Land Gallery, a tea-room-sized art space in the backyard of his Santa Fe home.

But Kikut is also a skilled painter, who has spent over three decades exploring the landscapes of the American West. Included in his current solo show at Big Happy Gallery are several series of works on paper that represent parallel approaches to the problem of representing nature today.

In his oil-on-paper pieces, every centimeter of land and sky is sensitively mottled, demonstrating his considerable talent as a colorist and close observational painter. Such landscapes are good but not new; they could have been painted a century ago.

Kikut is at his best when he makes us aware of the intrusive presence of the human observer. His circle-shaped watercolors reference the circular spyglass he uses to view landforms from a distance. By foregrounding the mechanical lens, he shows how the simple act of looking can border on surveillance. Our desire to connect with nature becomes a catch-22 when we bring our human habits of consumption and control with us into wild spaces.

Kikut鈥檚 most groundbreaking 鈥� and heartbreaking 鈥� works are his etchings of mountainscapes with wildlife stickers affixed on top. In these deceptively simple pieces, Kikut reduces majestic mountain ranges to thin outlines, reminiscent of the dry, empty landscapes of the Yuan dynasty Chinese landscape painter Ni Zan, who treated ink as a precious commodity, using it begrudgingly. In Kikut鈥檚 case, the visual austerity feels lonely and bleak.

Kikut then slaps a vinyl sticker of an elk or other wild animal on top of each etching 鈥� as if repopulating barren lands could be as easy as slap-tagging urban spaces with animal-shaped stickers. The stickers he uses are sold at national park gift shops to promote conservation, but they are, at the same time, disposable consumer products often made from petrochemicals. These are not animals, or even paintings of animals, but toxic vinyl replicants. If Kikut鈥檚 more traditional landscape paintings give the illusion of unmediated communion with nature, his sticker-on-etching pieces break that illusion, forcing us to confront the inherent contradictions of our Anthropocene era, when even well-meaning attempts to experience, or learn from, nature can manifest destructively.

鈥淧atrick Kikut: Works on Paper鈥� is on view at Big Happy Gallery, 1300 Luisa St., Suite 3A, Santa Fe, through May 23. Gallery hours: noon to 5 p.m. Thursday鈥揝aturday. For more information, visit .

Shelley Horton-Trippe and the messiness of life

After receiving a master鈥檚 in installation and video art from the University of Oklahoma in 1976, a young Shelley Horton-Trippe traveled to Paris to study with legendary new media artist Nam June Paik.

While there, she participated in the first International Women Artists exhibition organized by the UNESCO. Horton-Trippe moved to New Mexico in 1978, where she developed the Intercultural Media Forum at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the College of Santa Fe in the 1990s. She has participated in prominent international exhibitions over the years, including in 2001, when the Scottish curator Richard Demarco showed her work during the 49th Venice Biennale.

Despite these career highlights, Horton-Trippe remains vastly underappreciated. Sexism in the art world played a role, as it did for many women artists of her generation. But the multidisciplinary nature of her practice 鈥� which spans video, performance, installation and painting 鈥� also makes her a difficult artist to pin down. That鈥檚 not a problem for me, but it probably confuses many dealers and collectors who overvalue consistency.

Some of her video art pieces, such as 鈥淏oho Hobo,鈥� integrate drawing and painting as performative acts, much as Joan Jonas did in the 1970s and 鈥�80s. Even Horton-Trippe鈥檚 straight paintings 鈥� like those in her current solo show at Phil Space in Santa Fe 鈥� feel like performances. Each layered gesture is an improvised action that modifies or comments upon what鈥檚 underneath it. Like the process-oriented narrative painter Amy Sillman, Horton-Trippe moves between abstraction and figuration, letting meaning emerge over time.

Seemingly careless mark-making solidifies into legible forms as chaos gives way to order. In 鈥淓volution/Revolution鈥� (from which the exhibition gets its title), smeary streaks of brownish paint transition into an anatomically correct red heart. A delicate green seedling then sprouts from the heart. Horton-Trippe takes ideas that were buried in the underpainting and puts them back on top. Like a Jenga player reorganizing material into ever-more precarious arrangements, she stops just short of compositional collapse.

鈥淣ouveau Croquet鈥� is another good example of her intuitive process in action. A grayish head rests on the ground next to a multicolored paint splotch and a similarly sized croquet ball. If the artist had started from an initial idea or image 鈥� that of a game of croquet played with human heads 鈥� she probably would have painted several heads. And she probably would not have included a giant, multicolored paint splotch, which sabotages the clarity of the narrative. But blobs and splotches belong to the primordial soup of possibilities out of which her figures develop. Their destinies are not preordained; if she had made different painterly choices, they would have become different things.

A lesser painter might simply keep layering until all contradictions are leveled, the inchoate blobs obliterated and a new harmony and clarity achieved. But Horton-Trippe resists harmony and clarity. She intentionally keeps her paintings as loose, messy and unresolved as life itself.

鈥淓volution/Revolution鈥� by Shelley Horton-Trippe is on view at Phil Space, 1410 Second St., Santa Fe, through June 15. Gallery hours: noon to 5 p.m. Monday鈥揊riday, but visitors are advised to call ahead to confirm at 505-983-7945. For additional information, visit .

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the 近距离内射合集. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at .