Whitehot Magazine

Constructed Realities: Deborah Wasserman

Deborah Wasserman, Still Water. Courtesy of the artist. 

By EKIN ERKAN May 30, 2024

"If we opened people up, we'd find landscapes…” – Agnes Varda, The Beaches of Agnes (2008, dir. Agnes Varda)

In her new exhibition at Kuma Lisa Gallery (Melody Tian-Clark’s new gallery in the Lower East Side), Deborah Wasserman, born in Sao Paolo but now based in Jackson Heights, Queens, thematically navigates the planting of possibilities, the immanence of refuge, and the state of the nomad wander. The paintings that make up this exhibition bud, stretch, and soar, expanding upwards and downwards in direction, lapping variegated styles and motifs. These are works that, in propounding flourishing trees and flora, have to do with a kind of drifting and grounding. Make no mistake—these are fundamentally environmental and maternal works, each of them providing us with mystic views of nature. Formally speaking, sometimes these are cartographic views from afar and, in others, intimate, compact views; at times, the works are placid and deeply comforting while others show us a future of destruction—fire, flames, and smog wrought from our mishandling of Mother Nature. 

Wasserman’s constructed realities and sensual vistas give us a two-fold realm of possibilities. They simultaneously caution us while also illuminating a world of raw, fertile beginnings. This latter world is the world of the feminine, unblemished by the masculine vigor of cultivating nature to bend into the shape of man and masculinity. If there is one blanket term that gets to the heart of Wasserman’s series it is the indigenous world, as uncultivated nature bounds and unspools in myriad, knotty, delicate, and intricate directions.  

Deborah Wasserman, The Wave That Ate My Lunch. Courtesy of the artist.

Throughout her career as a painter, mixed-media artist, and performance artist, Wasserman has dealt with our collective mishandling of the earth and our exploitation of both our land and its inhabitants. Wasserman’s work is bolstered by a kind of feminist environmentalism. Consequently, Wasserman’s work is reminiscent of what Barry Schwabsky, in Landscape Painting Now (2019), identifies as “New Romanticism” and "Abstracted Topographies", looking at contemporary landscape artists like Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Maureen Gallace, Alexis Rockman, Hernan Bas, and Verne Dawson. However, Wasserman’s singular process, intensely intimate, is wholly her own.

Wasserman’s process is deeply phenomenological, acutely personal and, above all, maternal. When Wasserman returned to painting after a foray into performance art and works-on-paper, she wrested forth an instinctive, experiential process that she notes “goes in and out of painting”. Wasserman begins with a plain white canvas—an un-marred beginning resolute with possibilities—which she subsequently stains. The act of staining allows her to leave her perfunctory mark, stamping the nascent painting with a “birth”, a first contact of closeness. Wasserman compares this act of staining, which she always executes from above—a notable imagistic parallel image here is the traditional South American practice of giving birth while squatting—with an “exchange of fluid”. She sees the stained canvas as the soil from which a macrocosm will flourish. From here, using luminous, translucent layers of paint, Wasserman coats a series of underpaintings with scores of images that get folded into subsequent layers: women, faces, horizons, birds, landscapes, and specific locates are enveloped, sometimes even erased. This act of layering, much like creation of a domicile, is a process of building spaces and places. It is also akin to the anatomical layering of biological growth—skin laminated atop one another, seedling soaking up nutrients, flowerets flourishing into bloom. This is all conducted in an aleatory, subconscious spirit—the complex landscape so ascends, emerging in an organic becoming where form complements subject. It is thus fitting that the paintings often feature vertical spindling trees and vines that strain, swell, and reach skyward. For example, in 10 Cacao, a bitter lore, the eponymous cacao trees swell with plumes of chestnut-brown nuts that rise towards the heavens, seedling puffs and shrubs careening upwards like a heaving chest expelling air; the paintings, matching Wasserman’s process, lift our gaze, conducting our perception towards the heavens.

Deborah Wasserman, Creatures of the Light. Courtesy of the artist.

Wasserman sometimes also utilizes torn fabrics, ripped from used garments that either she or her children have worn. This is a means of imputing not only Wasserman’s memory and subjectivity into the canvas but also stitching in residuum of the corporeal body, stressing the materiality of the canvas. Wasserman notes that her process is “alchemical”, where that which is decayed—for instance, the used fabric—is recycled and composted, much like the human body’s eventual return to the earth for which it will serve as nutriment. Simply put, Wasserman’s process is cyclic. Again, form and subject find themselves in harmonious rapprochement, echoed by works like Amazon Dreaming, Feronia 1, and Home, which cull environmental themes like climate change. In Amazon Dreaming, we see streaks of crimson-tipped flames peaking against orange hills, lapping up cracked skeletons of tree remains. The barren is a recurrent theme that Wasserman underscores in Feronia 1; a clothespin balancing a gray, ambiguous garment is offset by billowing charcoal smog that threatens to grow into an all-consuming cluster. The title, Home, reminds us of Wasserman’s interest in the figure of the nomad and the myth of the “Wandering Jew”, which she notes is always implicit in her work; it features desiccated, sand-colored russet twigs catching aflame. These harbingers, though visually captivating, serve as reminders of our communal responsibility for our planet. Dispossession intimates as we are reminded of how indigenous populations like the Brazilian Amazon native Yanomami tribe have recently had their culture and habituation displaced from climate change. The theme of homelessness, dispossession, and the nomad is made metaphoric in one particularly evocative work where rolling golden hills are scaled with ladders.

As should be clear by now, Wasserman does not merely paint landscapes. Nor does she commits to one visual approach or arsenal, interested in multitudes rather than univocity. Gazing over her array of paintings, one is taken by how the sandy landscapes of Israeli flaxen-gold deserts seep into lush and verdant Brazilian primeval forests. Wasserman utilizes a patchwork of styles including post-impressionist Fauvist palettes, free-spirited abstract brushwork, and figurative-realist constituents. In one work, sloping fingers and hands drift in and out of a thorn-studded vine, layered atop a deep azure lake that is then crowned by leaves and serpentine, snake-like figures. Speaking of this this patchwork, Wasserman notes that she is “looking for the democracy of the canvas, [utilizing a] … patchwork of many styles, idioms, approaches, etc. [...] as I shift between various languages.” These are brought into a rich compositional harmony.

Where Wasserman’s paintings turn towards a possible better world, it is one that does away with the drive to manipulate the earth into imposing skyscrapers and the thirst for technological control of our surroundings. It is in this sense that her vertical organic forms and their extending expanse rival the high-rise superstructures of pollution, industry, and capitalist thirst. With this exhibition, Wasserman gives us a glimpse a nurturing world that opposes the industrial history of exploitation and its coeval patriarchic historical impetus. It is here that the possibilities for a new world united with, not in opposition to, Mother Nature begin. WM

 

Ekin Erkan

Ekin Erkan is a writer, researcher, and instructor in New York City.

view all articles from this author