Submitting to the Sublime • Stephanie Washburn & Jane Mulfinger
by Madeleine Eve Ignon
At the end of a long road near where highway 150 meets the 33 in Ojai is a round studio building where the Taft Gardens and Nature Preserve host artists in residence. Here, Stephanie Washburn and Jane Mulfinger were in residence from fall 2021 to spring 2022. Taft Gardens, and the studio within it, exist in a rich and mysterious space between the wild and controlled, and the natural and ordered. Inside the studio, just beyond a rather sobering sign to watch out for rattlesnakes, Washburn and Mulfinger’s respective bodies of work invite you to contemplate the natural world and the sublime.
Stephanie Washburn, install shot of Mental Weather, graphite on cut Arches paper, 2022
The space is intimate and humble, a miniature cathedral. Both artists, who also teach full time in the art departments at Santa Barbara City College and UC Santa Barbara, went back to basics during their time at Taft, paring down their multimedia practices in favor of simpler materials like graphite and acrylic paint.
Stephanie Washburn lives and works in Ojai, and was witness to the devastating Thomas Fire when it scorched the area in 2017. The terror and destruction of that event profoundly changed her life, her perspective, and her community. She writes, aptly: “Our relationship is within, not with, nature. There are no inanimate objects.” Her subtle graphite drawings, hung far off the wall in the Taft Gardens studio as if they are floating, cast shadows like transparent headstones. Each feels like a living memorial, animated by sublime grief and asserting their presence as both drawings and sculptures. They are viscerally affecting and quietly alive, and they demand a moment of repose and slowness to contemplate them. The greyscale of her skyscapes allows them to be any sky, anywhere, and to occupy an abstract conceptual space. But that lack of color also makes me remember the disturbing orange that was present in the Ojai sky in those terrifying days.
Stephanie Washburn, Mental Weather (detail), graphite on cut Arches paper, 2022
Washburn’s works are ventilated by cuts in the paper body that, as she puts it, “penetrate the imagery with physical air and leave the paper's structural integrity just barely intact.” Confronting one of them closely in the space at Taft, I was unaware of the cuts at first, and then unsettled by them, unsure if the paper could stand the cut. We’re taught as artists to preserve our works, to enable them as much as we can to be whole and live beyond us. The vulnerability and precarity of Washburn’s graphite pieces is arresting and moving. The cuts bring them more into a physical, bodily space, asking: what if a wound is laid bare and witnessed without an immediate attempt to fix it?
The cuts are exploratory and precise, evocative of scars whose healing is halted and suspended, like a quick breath of air caught in the chest. In multiple stacked parallel lines (which create an effect similar to natural light streaming through Venetian blinds), or in an “x” or starburst shape, the cuts grant us and the works themselves an expanded physical and mental space. I think of Lucio Fontana’s Cut series from the mid twentieth century as a potential point of comparison; it’s interesting to consider the physical act of cutting or slicing and the spectrum of intentionality behind that act.
A surgeon cuts to gain access into the world of an ailing body, to see inside. A surgeon doesn’t make any more cuts than she has to, but often more than one is necessary. She cuts to identify and extract what causes pain.
Lucio Fontana, an Argentine-Italian artist working during a time when the hyper- masculinized (and oft-mythologized) action painting of Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionist movement were dominating the landscape of American art, cut and perforated the surfaces of his canvases rather than painting on them. His works vibrate with defiance, violence and destruction; he wanted the cut to be the central focus of the piece. In Washburn’s works, the artist’s hand is like a surgeon’s, rather than a hand committing a violent or dissident act. Her incisions are deft and, crucially, caring. She honors her hands’ ability to create and destroy, and crafts a compelling relationship between those two acts. If, as art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, Fontana “meticulously violated” his canvases, Washburn is doing something more akin to performing tracheostomies– she’s bravely creating conditions that allow them to breathe. The cuts somehow render the images human.
Stephanie Washburn, Mental Weather video still, graphite on cut Arches paper, 2022
Washburn’s video piece, a collaboration with mezzo soprano Rebecca Comerford, brings the drawings to life even further by animating their slits with wind and sound. Comerford activates her breath and voice in relation to the movement of the drawings. As she breathes, so do the drawings. We see the wind move and penetrate the cuts in the paper. Washburn writes, “The work activates a visceral awareness of the material support, and an uneasy sense of both delicacy and physical violence, to the Romantic skyscape imagery.” She writes of the duality of the space and her approach to making during her time at Taft: “On a residency in paradise, I made drawings about the sublime, feelings of grief, and a quiet apocalypse.” Ojai has always been a place that attracts artists, and its recent history makes the complicated role of the artist come into even starker relief.
Jane Mulfinger’s series of paintings, They Became Evanescent, also explores the sublime and ineffable in nature. Mulfinger made the near daily journey to Taft from Santa Barbara, contemplating what she wanted to paint as she drove. Each painting includes a piece of text from an archive she has been amassing of language and phrases that describe weather phenomena. The phrases she chose to work with range from artful and poetic to bluntly and clinically descriptive. As we have all witnessed over the last decade or so, the ways we (the media, poets, scientists, etc.) describe and name weather has the power to evoke many emotional reactions. It can inspire fear through its novelty and dialed-up drama (I’m thinking of polar vortex, which, at least at the time when the media debuted the term, sounded more like the name of a cheesy Hollywood disaster film than a weather event). Language can also be comforting or grounding if it’s based in reliable science, or it can conjure the nuance of poetry or song.
Jane Mulfinger, Disturbed Westerly Warm, acrylic on paper
Each of Mulfinger’s small square paintings deal with a piece of text – a phrase such as “full fury” or “transpolar drift”– that is embedded within the layers of the abstract landscape, though the images don’t correlate directly to the text. “I tried my best to ignore the text,” Mulfinger said, instead letting each image evolve separately from it as she chased the “reminder of an atmosphere.” In all her work, Mulfinger is interested in verticality and horizontality, and the square, she says, “gives equal attention to both.” The shape gives these pieces stability and centrality, leading your eye to the text that sits in the middle of the picture plane.
Mulfinger’s installation and conceptual work often faces outward, creating a dialogue with her audience. These recent works are more intimate and inward; they speak to the complicated meanings and anxieties of the existential cultural and ecological moment we’re living in and through.
Mulfinger’s new paintings vaguely bring an artist like Ed Ruscha to mind, insofar as both artists are combining and dealing with text and landscape- although, importantly, Ruscha’s text-landscapes mainly deal with text on top of landscape, whereas Mulfinger makes a noteworthy conceptual and formal choice to embed and almost bury the text in layers of paint and color using custom vinyl. The words, only visible at close range, variously dissolve and disappear into the saturated weather Mulfinger alludes to, or emerge to declare their dominance over it.
Jane Mulfinger, Darkly Glistening, acrylic on paper
A useful comparison for Mulfinger’s paintings might be individual cards of opening title sequences in film. At the beginning of many Westerns, for example, the text is literally situated within or on top of the sweeping zoomed-out desert landscape. In some recent sequences, the text is more directly relating to what is happening in the image, letters sitting on a building or disappearing behind a bus. Mulfinger’s ‘mise en scènes’ are more tightly cropped in their composition and looser in their references (and the square dimensions evade a straight comparison to the contemporary screen), but you might look at one and see a frame of a painterly opening sequence called ‘Cold Front’ or ‘Easterlies.’
Washburn and Mulfinger walk the line between making images that are both general and specific, and each brings sensitivity and care to her subjects, concepts, and concerns. Mulfinger’s paintings look out onto nameless but richly colorful mountains and seascapes that carry and hold human-made language attempting to describe the indescribable. Washburn’s drawings look up to a soft-edged, grayscale sky and its marble-like cloud patterns for light, expanse, and maybe a little more space to breathe. Both artists have created bodies of work that respond not only to the immediate landscape of the Taft Gardens and Nature Preserve, but to all that is sublime and evanescent beyond.
Cover Image: Stephanie Washburn, Mental Weather installation at the Taft Botanical Gardens, 2022
