“Internal Weather” Sara Kim on Elise Rasmussen
In the spring of 1815, the largest volcanic eruption ever recorded in human history took place on Mount Tambora, Indonesia. Particles and gasses were released into the atmosphere, and clouds reflected the sun’s radiation back into space causing a drop in the earth’s temperature leaving behind traces of extreme weather conditions across Europe and North America known as “the year without a summer.” In Elise Rasmussen’s body of work taken from the same title, three distinct time frames are interlocked: Mount Tambora’s eruption, Mary Shelley’s writing of “Frankenstein” the following year, and the present moment.
During the aftermath of Tambora’s eruption, artists started depicting this phenomenon of color and light. We see these disruptions in the sky through the paintings of J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich where particles have scattered into the abyss bringing forth vibrant coral coloured sunsets, tumultuous clouds, and existential awakening. English art critic John Ruskin describes Turner as the artist who could “stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature" yet striving to express the infinite and elusive essence of man [1]
Rasmussen uses photography as a portal into the remote human past by revisiting the locations affected by Tambora’s eruption, including the mountain itself and Lake Geneva, capturing them through large colour photographs. In her triptych piece titled “On both sides of the world, where they felt worlds apart,” Rasmussen draws parallels with Shelley’s time writing her most famous science fiction novel during a three month stay near Lake Geneva, Switzerland, and as a response to the severe storms, famine, and crime raging throughout Europe. Nearly 200 years later, she too stays in the same location near Lake Geneva, for the same duration of time as Shelley during her residency in the hottest summer on record. The urgency and destructive nature of the climate’s impact illuminates existing social and political inequalities both past and present, yet reinvents the human imagination by questioning our own place in the world and the void at which it is inescapable. As ashes preserve in resin traces of form and matter from the past, Rasmussen uses the act of documenting the landscape from these historical moments to preserve one’s own story in her own time. She depicts landscapes that attempt to make us conscious of memory and reflection, yet challenging our perceptions of the broader effects of nature through its infinite manifestations - what philosopher Immanuel Kant describes as a stroke of the sublime. The camera lens becomes the third eye of re-looking into the past from the present with particles that still float and exist to this day. The same particles that have dramatically disrupted and altered life, and have drifted across mountain tops and large bodies of water. It is the artist’s way of making sense of the land, its movements, and depth that constitute both world and self.
In her video piece titled “The Year Without a Summer,” Rasmussen explores mankind’s relationship to earth and its politics, and narrates her own internal weather of regressions from her native home landscape of Canada as well as the loss and grief that haunts one’s subconscious. She uses diaristic accounts to curate and combine historical events depicted through flashbacks of Shelley’s experience during 1816 alongside the present including her own visit to the top of Mount Tambora and present-day Lake Geneva. This relationship between artist and land is substantial, and documentation is more ephemeral than actual. Environmental artist Robert Smithson writes “This new realm of the invisible is complex, diverse, and subtle, its form and motion often indicated only by faint and ephemeral traces recorded.” [2] Rather than delivering us a film narrative with a beginning, climax, and resolution, Rasmussen’s story defies these notions by sitting on its own terms with the boundary between speculator and observer blurred when looking at events past and present.
In Rasmussen’s installation piece titled “In the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains” large portrait sized panels of sheer silk cyanotypes hang from the ceiling and are layered in front and side by side. The cyanotypes depict brushstrokes of clouds, glorious mountain ranges, and splashes of atmospheric void. Reminiscent to Yves Klein’s famous blue sky paintings, one can question where the sky begins and ends, and by entering through the blue void the realm of the infinite still remains unseen. We also see Rasmussen’s use of sequencing to arrive at what might be considered the essence of a new image created from multiples, and like particles themselves that multiply into the abyss creating something new we are presented with a landscape out of landscapes. By adding new layers of depth through fragments of imagery, whilst retaining traces of what has gone before, our linear experience of time and space is blurred and cannot be easily grasped. A multitude of small bits exist - the layering of climate conditions and change, the layering of what is hidden and what is coming into the light, and the layering of past and present. Particles forms the “ceaseless tides of the becoming and dissolution of things. Out of it things are made; into it they dissolve. So constant, so pervasive, dust, aggregating and disintegrating, gauges matters on its way to and from being. So dust would seem to measure history and the historian, not the reverse,” as Joseph A. Amato writes in his book ‘Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible.’ [3] We see this repeated pattern of layering of time and matter and the artist’s dematerialization end result, in which idea is predominant over material form. Environmental artist Robert Smithson once wrote on how the earth and the mind have a way of intertwining with one another: “One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason. Vast moving faculties occur in this geological miasma, and they move in the most physical way. This movement seems motionless, yet it crushes the landscape of logic under glacial reveries. This slow flowage makes one conscious of the turbidity of thinking. A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an aesthetic process that has scarcely been touched.”[4]
Contemplating Rassumen’s work, we are invited to think about art in relation to earth and self. Art should keep us unsettled, in the sense where obscurity and ambiguity are welcomed. When photography crosses the barrier into art, it is no longer a document of time for a passive viewer to receive a set of facts and information. Art ignites more. More contemplation, more thought, more truth. Art produces passion and passion produces life which seeks higher and higher truth and meaning.[5] In “The Year Without a Summer,” one must think about free movement of each particle and ash which has affected certain kinds of geological, ethical, political, and aesthetic gestural changes. There is a sense of anticipation towards an apocalyptic endgame marked throughout this body of work, reminding us of our own mortality. These notions of thought draw one in but one remains withdrawn – at the edge of perception. We realize that we are caught in a more endless totality of particles. From dust we are created, to dust we return into the earth. We are made up of them and coexist with them. They are limitless and intangible yet give us awareness of their immeasurable expressions time and time again.[6]
References:
[1] David Piper, ‘The Illustrated History of Art’ (London: Bounty Books, 2000)
[2] Robert Smithson, ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,’ Artforum vol. 7, no. 1 (September 1968)
[3] Joseph A. Amato, ‘Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible’ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000)
[4] Robert Smithson, ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,’ Artforum vol. 7, no. 1 (September 1968)
[5] Carter Ratcliff, ‘Cruel and tender’, Tate Research Publication, 2003, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/photography/cruel-and-tender
[6] Timothy Morton, ‘Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World’ (Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
Elise Rasmussen is a research-based artist working with lens-based media. She has exhibited, performed and screened her work internationally including venues such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum, Pioneer Works (New York), Night Gallery, JOAN (Los Angeles), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Belvedere 21 (Vienna), Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), Dazibao (Montreal), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto and Gallery 44 (Toronto). Elise received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a Merit Scholarship and has been an artist in residence at a number of institutions including the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), La Becque (Switzerland), the Nirox Foundation (South Africa), LMCC (New York), Shandaken Projects (Storm King, New York), SOMA (Mexico City), the Banff Centre (Banff, Alberta) and was a 2016 Fellow in the Art & Law Program (New York). Elise has been written about in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, BOMB Magazine, and the New Inquiry, and has received grants and awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, NYFA/NYSCA, and the American Austrian Foundation. Born in Edmonton, Canada, Elise lives in Los Angeles, California.
