Into the woods – Immi C. Storrs at The Century Association

Immi C. Storrs is obsessed with depth: she manipulates it, refusing to render it as-is. Instead, her adventures in depth-perception range from steeply sloping forests—her favorite subject— to thickly layered glass light-box dioramas, and to truncated and oddly meshed animal forms in bronze. While the animals merge together into multi-legged seemingly mythological beasts, or emerge pseudo-two dimensionally from a bronze cube, it’s less about the creatures themselves—horses, sheep, and oxen, but more of a slow-down lugubrious space in which forms melt together and time becomes unpredictable.

But it is her dark fantasy forests where we see most clearly Storrs’ use of nature as a vehicle in order to play with three dimensions. The paintings of forests in this exhibition (not the lightboxes) depict multitudes of trunks in bleak arboreal-scapes. The branches and leafy-tops have been neatly lopped off, so we have a progression of dark narrow cylinders climbing upwards precipitously. As in Forest No. 6, stage center of the painting is where the trees are thickest, and the accumulation of trees blocks out the sky, save for a central break in the forest and an occasional narrow clear slot. The bases of the trunks gently slope outwards in a stereotypical root formation and through strategic spacing form a perspectival triangle receding at sharp angles into the distance. The effect manages to be claustrophobic yet without any sense of boundary: similar to a true overgrown forest in which the vegetation makes movement difficult or impossible but still we conceive the immensity of the forest regardless. Forest No. 6, and Storrs’ other landscapes also lend themselves easily to ecological critique, the trees are clearly dead, and the cause is human. A stain of red, becoming the focus of the painting because all else is in black and white, indicates that some violence has transpired at the heart of the forest, but the artist doesn’t allow us to know what has happened.

Trees with Snow, Diptych No. 1 diffuses the claustrophobia of the overgrown forest, instead representing the bleakness of environmental depredation through expanses of dark soil and ghostly streaks of snow. The precipitous perspective is still present: a horizon line curves just beneath the top of the canvas. Most importantly, Storrs has folded the picture in the middle, and with a literal practicality, enveloped the viewer in the scene. Artists have always enjoyed playing with corners, and frequently it’s a dead end—but Storrs has kept the imagery sparse and simple, and presents us with a very basic equation of a solitary figure, us, observing a sloping landscape. So it works. The artist’s imagery isn’t always so dire, and her experiments with the spatial illusion can be directed towards representations of fecundity as well as emptiness and dimunition. In Trees with Man and Birds, Storrs paints on tempered glass and then layers the sheets of glass within crisp illuminated boxes. While the resulting imagery is still far from comforting, instead offering a surreal and miraculous kind of illuminated vignette, Storrs allows the light to filter through the green of her forest canopy, and even through the trunks and ground beneath. The effect is not of a dying ecosystem, but a energetic and devouring organism, in which her two characters, an indifferent man and startled bird have to contend. The numerous lightboxes present both themes of teeming live and its absence, but the luminous quality does offer a touch of optimism that the paintings seem to consciously suppress.

Immi Storrs, Trees with Snow, Diptych No. 1

The bronze sculptures of groups of farm animals extent the artist’s experiments with how to render objects in space. There are also lone birds and figures, but what I found most intriguing was Storrs’ frequent overlapping of animal forms which served the dual purpose of creating multi-headed mythological beasts while also creatively rendering groups of figures viewed from a distance, where physical features start to blend and combine. These are perspectivally rendered creatures, hulking forms with 6,7, or 8 legs, and multiple heads lowing at the skies. The sweetest and least terrifying of the chimera is Two Headed Bull, a charming little bronze fellow with a head on either end and the normal complement of four legs. Once can imagine an extraterrestrial describing such an animal to his compatriots after landing in a cow patch and spying some bovine creatures, but relying on a very brief and distant viewing, of two cows standing next to each other—this is how myths are born! Storrs sculpture culminates in hybrid forms which incorporate not only the farm animals, but the farm and the landscape as well. Will Heinrich in his essay on the exhibition describes Bull Box, No. 1 (1989):

A weathered bronze box about a foot high, the piece depicts, rendered around its faces in various states of relief, a group of bulls both living and skeletal. Three heads emerge in one direction with a fourth set partially back. Their gazes are friendly and inquisitive, and even the dead one isn’t too solemn. They seem to be eternal, after the fashion of animals in a cave painting—passing flashes of an endless, seasonal progression. A few tiny farm buildings atop the box reinforce this impression.

In a nutshell, or a bronze box, we have the spatial and philosophical explanation of the landscape that is Storrs’s unique focus. How can nature be rendered symbolically through the eyes of the viewer? The artist has chosen a manipulated perspective, one that condenses the fundamental components of the ecosystem into a geometry that illustrates the fragility of that ecosystem, but also its foreigness and uncontrollability, as well as the interlinking systems of which it’s made, and which can never be unraveled.

Immi C. Storrs at The Century Association, through May 22.
7 West 43rd Street, NYC

About the writer: Will Corwin is a sculptor and writer from New York. He makes cast metal sculptures and writes regularly for the Brooklyn Rail, Art & Antiques, and ArtPapers. His most recent curatorial project was 60s Synchronicities this past summer at the Collegiale Notre-Dame de Riberac in Perigord, featuring the work of Perle Fine, Marguerite Louppe, and Jann Haworth. His most recent exhibition was a survey of the work of his last ten years of sculpture, at River House Arts in Toledo Ohio, and will be at Geary Gallery in New York this coming April.

Make your tax-deductible donation today and help Art Spiel continue to thrive. DONATE