Kurt Lightner, Untitled , 2005; acrylic ink on Mylar collage, 50 1/4 x 34 1/4 inches;

Collection of Ninah and Michael Lynne, New York

“People who live correct lives do not know that you cannot experience a landscape until you have known all its discomforts, as well as its more attractive aspects. You have to curse & fight mosquitoes, be slapped by stinging branches, fall over rocks & skin your knees, be stung by nettles, scratched by grasshopper grass, and pricked by brambles, know the torments of thirst, be exhausted by steep hills, before you have really experienced the world of nature.”

-Charles Burchfield, July 12, 1941, from Charles Burchfield's Journals: The Poetry of Place

“When tourists step up to the edge of a scenic overlook, I believe they are looking not for beauty alone but to make sure [nature's] still there.”

- Kurt Lightner, from his untitled master's thesis, School of Visual Arts, New York

Kurt Lightner's magical and hallucinatory woodland scenes exist somewhere between reality and fantasy. Inspired by the virgin forest that bordered his childhood home in rural Ohio, Lightner's images capture a romanticized view of a specific place that at one time seemed full of wonder, discovery, and escape. These prized five acres of backwoods territory not only provided fertile soil for a child's expeditionary ramblings, but also for Lightner's burgeoning artistic imagination. Memories of this special place—with its indigenous plants, trees, rocks, and insects—have been filtered through time and experience, and reconstituted into amalgamated images of data and imagination. Ideas of memory and place, along with their attendant fragility, lie at the core of Lightner's works.

Composed of hundreds of elements that have been painted on Mylar and then individually cut out by hand, Lightner's collages pulsate with color and energy, with light penetrating and ricocheting through the dense layers of translucent and slightly opalescent material. Significantly, the collages, especially the largest examples, engage viewers both visually and physically—colors modulate, light changes, and visceral sensations shift as viewers move side to side, forward and backward. In this sense, Lightner's magnificently detailed woodland tapestries recall their inspirational source, a relationship the artist specifically strives to duplicate: “I want the viewer to be immersed in the image. Just like in dense woods one can get lost in.”3 And like memories and thoughts of nature that fire and recede in the brain, in Lightner's synthetic world, nature seems alive, active, and all encompassing. Nostalgia and experience become one.

Lightner's own nostalgia for childhood discovery shines brightly in these works. As a boy he scoured the woods behind his house for unusual specimens— fossils, rocks, flora—which he then categorized and assembled into quasi-cabinets of curiosities (and he even created something of a botanical garden in his backyard by replanting some of his “rarest” and most unusual plant specimens).4 His collages bear similarities to these activities, as both involve related steps: discovery (painting), recovery (cutting), categorizing (composing), and finally, displaying (exhibiting). Not surprisingly, Lightner refers to the individual components in his works as “specimens.” A sense of place and personal history are of the utmost importance in Lightner's works, a strategy that he shares—to quite striking effect—with the visionary American Modernist Charles Burchfield, who was also an Ohio native who found inspiration in its countryside. As did Burchfield several decades before him, Lightner continually mines his intimate knowledge of the unmythologized Midwestern surroundings of his past, and cloaks it in a veil of mood, emotion, and nostalgia.

Nostalgia, however, is an imperfect construct and anything but an accurate representation of the past. Lightner seizes on this notion, forging an entirely new, fantastical world whose roots are tenuously grounded in reality. Some specimens in Lightner's collages can certainly be found in the real world—buckeyes, pinecones, seedpods, ferns—but none look exactly like those he has painted; while other elements are completely fictional and open to interpretation. What are viewers to make of the tangled bursts of scribbly lines that punctuate and enliven some of Lightner's largest and most claustrophobic compositions? Are they tumbleweeds? tufts of grass? swarming insects? Perhaps they are something else completely? Lightner lets his imagination run wild while generously empowering viewers to concoct their own ideas of what these forms might be and what they might symbolize. Viewers are authors of their own landscapes. At the same time, however, the artist takes care to shape what kind of emotional impact his works will have on viewers. Some of his works are positively joyful, packed with swirling and exuberantly hued forms that conjure a feverish, psychedelic, sylvan utopia. Cellular organisms, flowers bursting with color, and trees pulsing with thick veins of sap all come together to form a world brimming with life and hope.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, though, are dark and melancholic forests that portend despair and loss. These woodlands are extremely dense and somewhat foreboding. By severely reducing the collages' spatial depth and eliminating areas of rest for the eye, Lightner constructs something of an impenetrable wall of trees that adamantly refuses viewers' entry. Unlike most of his works, which are warm, welcoming, and optimistic, these darker works are overpowering and tinged with feelings of dread. Lighter bears witness to nature's duality: birth and death, ecstasy and gloom are equal partners in the never-ending cycle of existence. At the same time however, these darker, more sinister works are particularly meaningful to the artist on a personal level as elegies to a nature that is increasingly under fire and quickly disappearing. As Lightner mourns : “In reality the family farm and woods is hanging in the balance, so to speak. It will probably be sold off in the next couple of years and then, like many small farms, turned into subdivisions. It is the loss of a family history that is tied to the land it has worked for many years.”5

In a sense , one could perceive Lightner's collages as emotional barometers, each representing how he sees (or remembers) his world at a given time. Some are haunted by loss, others are full of delirious elation. In either case, nature is a psychological touchstone that offers refuge for a transplanted small-town boy (Lightner now lives in New York), whose daily interactions with authentic wilderness belong to an ever - r eceding past. Instead, he, like millions of others who live in urban areas, must make do with a manipulated version of the wild or idyllic landscape. But Lightner is mindful that no matter how constructed our nature is—whether it is the Great Lawn in Central Park, a botanical garden, a suburban backyard, or the ink on Mylar collages that he creates—it has an unparalleled capacity to transform lives, to provide opportunity for discovery and, ultimately, transcendence.

Elizabeth Dunbar

Curator

Notes

1. J. Benjamin Townsend, ed., Charles Burchfield's Journals: The Poetry of Place (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 347. Also quoted in Roald Nasgaard, “Charles Burchfield and the Theme of North,” in Michael D. Hall and Nannette V. Maciejunes, The Paintings of Charles Burchfield: North by Midwest (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. in Association with the Columbus Museum of Art, 1997), 36.

2. Kurt Lightner, untitled master's thesis, School of Visual Arts, New York, 2004, np.

3. Lightner, e -mail exchange with the author, December 5, 2005.

4. Lightner cites as an influence the celebrated gardener and botanist John Tradescant (1577–1638), who traveled extensively to Europe and North Africa collecting plants and bringing many new species back to England. He established a “psychic garden” in London and later opened a public museum of curiosities. For more information about the history of cabinets of curiosities and botanical gardens, see Patrick Mauries, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002).

5. Lightner, e-mail exchange with the author, December 5, 2005.

Born in Columbus, Ohio , in 1971, Kurt Lightner lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design, Ohio, and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Clementine Gallery in New York, and his work has been included in such notable group exhibitions as Greater New York at PS1/MoMA, New York, and Queens International 2004 at the Queens Museum of Art, New York. This is his first solo museum exhibition. He is a visiting artist at the Kemper Museum.