Featured artists: Eco Baroque - collaborators Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas
'Warlock Spritz Bath' From the exhibition "Warlord Sun King: The Genesis of Eco-Baroque" -The amethyst geode with the bottle of champagne in it will be getting custom-made brass plumbing and will be a bidet that runs on champagne! Louis XIV would surely have one if he were alive today.
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It is with great pleasure that I feature the work of Conkle and Lucas as my last blog about rock oriented art work, or at least the last blog about rock oriented art work in association with the Eagle Rock Rock and Eagle Shop. Their work employs humor and a well tuned aesthetic to address some serious issues about the environment and our drastic human effect upon it. This image of the champagne bottle in a large geode is on first glance celebratory and jubilant about nature's excessive beauty and ours for it, but also it emits a subtle yet powerful ominousness that seeps in upon looking at Conkle and Lucas' entire body of work. This image deepens into a symbol of our excesses despite nature. Humanity's blinders are on, and our disregard for how our hedonism affects our planet is paramount. I see this thread of celebration throughout their work, a tongue and cheek enjoyment of combining materials from the natural world and the manmade, but to great effect. Instead of hitting the viewer between the eyes with a straight forward message about what we're doing to our planet, they employ a more effective playful storyline of baroque aesthetics to hit home the message memorably.
Eco: Concerned with living things in relation to their environment.
Baroque
: Extravagantly ornate, florid, and convoluted in character or style.
Eco-Baroque artists Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas. (Photos by Lucas, Alp Horns by Conkle)
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Conkle has been dubbed the preeminent eco-artist dealing with topics such as global warming and a post-apocoliptic future, but not without any hope. His thought is that there exists a rainbow beyond the mushroom cloud, as pictured in a colored pencil drawing by Conkle, called New Beginning. Lucas, more focused on the merger of the self relating to nature- her series called MLSP (Marni Lucas Self Portraiture) is an ongoing evolving series commenting on social roles, the nuances of persona and our fragile existence in nature. Together Conkle and Lucas bring the best of their perspectives merging their tools of trade to form humor-filled but powerfully emitting works.
"Warlord Sun King" chandelier. From the exhibition "Warlord Sun King: The Genesis of Eco-Baroque"
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Tanning bed, grow lights, cable, crystals, rocks, live plants, moss, coconut, meteorite, recycled containers, motor, mixed media. At the lowest point of the 'chandelier', a single large pendulous crystal turns on a motor.
This piece, Warlord Sun King, refers to a post apocalyptic imagining of Luis XIV's Versailles, but instead of the grandeur of gold and dangling cut crystals, geodes and clumps of moss hang on wires, florid tin foil wall panels back the artist's ornate self portraits, and a tanning bed upturned becomes the chandelier substitute. There is a sadness in this work but it leaks out, seeps through, and reaches through an enjoyable facade.
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Everytime I look at the Moon I think of Crop Circles By Bruce Conkle. (photo Marne Lucas) Wood, metal, stone, meteorite, silicone
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“Sodom/Gomorrah/Milk/Salt” A short film by Marne Lucas. (photo Bruce Conkle) An hallucinatory slow motion scene of languid and sensual interludes with two separate couples cavorting in a milky white pool, references the biblical story of Lot and his Wife who turns into a pillar of salt upon looking over her shoulder as they leave Sodom and Gomorrah; but also aims to reclaim the Old Testament references of bodily sin or lust, as one of an intimate, healing, and life affirming ritual. Video footage and photos shot specifically for this project at Great Salt Lake, Utah of salt-encrusted beach, rocks and milky saline water will be combined with footage of the couples ritually bathing in the ‘milk pool’. Eerie black & white Oregon desert landscape scenes will be filmed with a heat-sensitive IR (infrared) camera and used in the green-screen backgrounds.
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-BIG NEWS! MONGOLIA 360° The 2nd Land Art Biennial Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas have been invited to participate in the MONGOLIA 360° Land Art Biennial, where they will be building an Eco-Baroque site specific installation August 5-18th in the Gobi Desert and presenting at the Symposium 2012 in Ulaanbataar, Mongolia. The team will be metal-leafing rocks using non-toxic materials, felting stones from local wool, and working with ideas about local mythology about the land and the current mining situation in Mongolia.
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