Red Boar, Pink Air:

Cory Sewelson’s Examination of Man & Nature

by Betty Ann Brown

His heart red as a boar

beat beat

like a pink green butterfly

Philippe Soupault 1

The paintings in Cory Sewelson’s Missing Links series combine a postmodern engagement of nature with a poetic mix of images and objects. Conceptually, Sewelson’s works recall the problematic distinction between world and earth described by Hannah Arendt. Formally, the paintings are eclectic and surreal, recalling early texts by Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German Jewish political theorist. In The Human Condition (1958), she discussed the human-constructed world, by which she meant the things we make, both concrete (objects) and conceptual (institutions and ideologies). 2     Arendt contrasted the world with the earth, or the natural environment, in which all animals live, including human animals. “The earth is the totality of life, along with the rocks and soils, the seas and the air. It provides the materials with which we build a world.”3          The world is human artifact; the earth is nature. And yet, as British environmentalist Anne Chapman points out, “All things on earth (the planet) that have material existence, in time and space, are part of the earth, whatever their genesis. A [wooden] chair, as a human artefact, is clearly part of the world, but in that its material is subject to the processes of the living earth, it is [also] part of the earth.”4

When Sewelson juxtaposes depictions of man-made structures with images of the sea or sky or wild plants, he calls our attention to our tendency to separate culture and nature, and to our history of valuing the former over the latter. He pictorializes the way human constructions—whether physical or ideological—colonize the natural. Indeed, the world can frame or even determine how we see the earth.

Sewelson’s Captain Cook Off Course (2008) is a large rectangular panel that marries images of the natural realm—tropical fish on a coral reef, penguins on an ice flow—with depictions of deep-sea divers, an abandoned rowboat, and a Tahitian proa (a long, canoe-like vessel). Racing out of the upper right-hand corner of the canvas, the Tahitian boat crashes through a large wave lifted from a popular woodblock print by Hokusai. (A vertical panel covered with calligraphic script confirms the Japanese source.) Behind the wave hovers a hot pink sun and, beside it, three realistically portrayed Emperor Penguins. This is where it gets really interesting: below the realistic penguins is a profile penguin head drawn in a simplified childlike or graffiti style. And below that are two standing penguins. Only the careful viewer will notice right away that these are actually people wearing penguin costumes. The legs of their costumes drape and winkle around the bright red shoes.

The air was a splendid pink the color of red mullet

And the forest when I prepared to enter it

Began with a tree with cigarette paper leaves

Andre Breton 5

Sewelson’s work is not solely or even primarily intellectual. Instead, it has the allusive and elusive qualities of poetry. It particularly resembles collaborative poems produced by Andre Breton, the founding father of Paris Surrealism, and his colleague Philippe Soupault. They believed, as Breton wrote in the First Manifesto of Surrealism, “in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.”6        It is precisely these poetic and “previously neglected” dreamlike associations that are key to Sewelson’s work.

His Tamed (2008) parallels the Breton verse quoted above. Just as the poet could not see the forest without remembering that tree trunks were transformed into cigarette papers, Sewelson looks at his family dog and thinks of how we transform animal skins into gloves. He covers the body of the seated Golden retriever with flattened gardening gloves that are painted to resemble canine fur. We tame dogs to make them our companions; we also “tame” plants to give us pleasure. The sainted dog—he has a metallic halo–is perched in a Durer-like flower garden comprised of painted and collaged plastic flowers.

A similar “discussion” of the objectification of animals appears in Satchel, the large painting of an Indian elephant. His body is covered with plastic purses, again painted to resemble animal skin. Behind the elephant hovers a bright red umbrella, not quite protecting him—just as environmental legislation doesn’t quite protect the numerous threatened species. Peanut shells are scattered at the elephant’s feet. He lifts one, tentatively, with his trunk. You can almost sense the presence of the zookeeper who tossed the nuts in his direction.

Sewelson is a postmodern bricoleur. Like an old fashioned handyman, he creatively deploys the materials at hand: the detritus of both nature (crushed leaves, fractured seed pods, fallen feathers) and culture (broken buttons, solitary sprockets, Black baby doll heads.) Many of Sewelson’s assembled works straddle the contested space between painting and sculpture. In doing so, they recall Robert Rauschenberg’s oeuvre from the 1950s, particularly the “combines” like Charlene (1954) and Canyon (1959).

Rauschenberg challenged viewers to decipher the significance of his juxtaposed puzzles. Similarly, as Sewelson’s “combines” compels us to perform poetic “math.” How does this object relate to that object? How do they both interact with that image? Or with that one? Humans are meaning-making beings. We must create explanations—and so when we see disparate objects and images, we endeavor to figure out how they “add up.”

Sewelson’s paintings resist easy resolution. Visually seductive but troubling, they attract then confound. They force our thoughts down rarely trodden paths. And these are paths we should explore: paths of poetry and beauty, yes, but also paths of conscious consideration of our place on the planet.