ART REVIEW : Two Artists Plumb Inner, Outer Worlds

Works by L.A. artists Margaret Nielson and Jill Giegerich are seen in separate exhibitions at Santa Monica Museum of Art, but each emphasizes one of the two great paths humankind has traditionally pursued in hoping to unravel life’s mysteries. Nielson scrutinizes nature for clues; Giegerich plumbs the mind for insight.

Nielson, now in her mid-40s, has shown hereabouts for a quarter-century. Daughter of a Canadian Mountie, she comes honestly by her subject. This exhibition of about 90 works, titled “Margaret Nielson: Ecstatic Visions and Unnatural Acts,” was organized by guest curator Jim Starrett and marks her first in-depth survey. She survives the ordeal well. The ensemble feels intensely engaged, authentic and modest.

Basically, she’s a visionary landscape painter in the mold of Albert Pinkham Ryder or Ralph Blakelock. She shares their dark views and that turgid paint handling that lends imagery an aura of troubled sincerity.

There’s more than a touch of thrift-shop Outsider Art here. But Nielson’s mind is not mired entirely in the past or in itself. Elements of Magritte-like surrealism tiptoe in to play practical jokes on perception. “Drop of a Hat” shows a fedora that’s either flying at Mach speed or being consumed in liquid fire. At her most antic she reminds you a bit of Ed Ruscha. There’s a keen little drawing of an accordion-pleated folder of postcards where a waterfall cascades through all of them.

All of this is acted out in a tone that is haunted, mournful and slightly alarmed. The ensemble says, “Nature is trying to tell us something and we are not listening.”

Her largest pictures are variations on 19th-Century grand-manner, Manifest-Destiny landscapes like those of Albert Bierstadt. Among the most telling is “Sierra Nevada Morning.” It depicts a Great Gatsby type leaning on the mantle of his Victorian mansion evidently striking a pose for a visitor who has interrupted his reading and whiskey. A fire roars in the hearth. Above it hangs a landscape painting of magnificent clouds, awesome pinnacles, sublime cataracts and endearing deer.

The scene washes into another, the identical view of nature rendered at life-size scale. You wonder when first looking at the living room scene why there isn’t a stuffed-animal trophy over the mantle. Nielson is clearly making a larger point. Western man is probably the only human tribe that has ever taken the position that nature belongs to him and not the other way around. We think we can do as we like with the planet. We trivialize its power.

There is a subtler point. Neither the landscape depicted over the hearth nor the life-scaled one next to it is real. We’ve so artificialized nature we can’t tell it from a painted backdrop in a theater.

Since nature is always the Great Mother, it’s easy for the artist to extend her theme to women. She paints a pretty bride being photographed in Yosemite Valley. She shows a chorus-line cowgirl sprawled with suggestive abandon on horseback. Our addiction to cliches and delusions has brought us to a place where we’ve lost sight of reality in all its aspects.

A series of miniatures finds nature issuing warnings. An empty canoe bursts into flame while birds fly away as if fleeing the biblical ark. Fish leap in frantic circles and elk bellow while heedless campers tend their fire.

As if to underline the cost of all this in everyday city life there is a set of stamp-size miniatures under the motto, “Love Doesn’t Die, It Suffers a Series of Little Murders.” Under it we see a stabbed teddy bear, a shot dog and a wedding ring hanging on a fishhook.

An impressive recent painting suggests a change of direction. Called “Mirror,” it depicts a symmetrical flock of happy, colorful birds against a spectacular sunset. It’s dedicated to the recently extinct Carolina parakeet. For a painting with the smell of death about it, it’s extraordinarily lyrical. It can be making no point other than to act as a reminder that nature still has beautiful answers for those who will listen.

Giegerich’s show, called “Drawings, Notebook, Construction,” is like a casual catch-up visit with an old acquaintance. She’s a member of a notable generation of CalArts graduates whose work, like her own, became well-known.

The single large construction is a variation on her familiar practice of employing such ordinary building materials as plywood, linoleum and sandpaper. This one is structured of an amorphously shaped metal frame. It looks like a found object created in the immolation of a large building where the fire was hot enough to melt metal. Its centerpiece is a commemorative metal plate, probably of pewter.

According to a brochure essay by SMMA director of exhibitions Noriko Gamblin, this little show marks an aesthetic course correction for the artist, inspired by a recent trip to Indonesia. The artist, she says, was deeply impressed by a culture where continuity is valued over compartmentalization.

This work does seem more relaxed than that of old, but its fundamental character hasn’t changed. Giegerich continues to look inward. An archetypal work by her might be a vortex carrying off a classical temple or a Cubist construction that is less about aesthetic formalities than about a feeling the world is falling apart.

Leafing through a book of drawings one sees unstable couches, candles, architectural fragments. There is the head of a woman with an elaborate coiffure and the words, “She died no she didn’t.” She evidently lives in a world where one is unsure of existence.

Giegerich’s landscape is clearly the horizonless space of the mind. It’s about the restlessness and doubt of pure thought which, lacking an anchor, knows not what to value or where to rest.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-0433), to March 26, closed Mondays and Tuesdays.