Here, we ask an artist to frame the essential details behind one of their latest works.
Bio: Cindy Phenix, 35, Los Angeles
Title of work: Common Contemplation Extends to Prolongate Deeper into Themselves the Echo
Where to see it: “Who Countest the Steps of the Sun” at Nino Mier Gallery, New York.
Three words to describe this work: Abyss, excess, iridescence.
What was on your mind at the time: I have been thinking about the Anthropocene context and the unseen. The traces of past ecological decisions that generated change, loss, and extinction in our ecosystem. I’m primarily interested in the challenges in relation to water: ghost nets, ocean acidification, coastal preservation, to name a few, and its impact on marine life, shellfish, and coral reefs.
While eco-climate anxiety and grief presents itself through my narrative, the realization of our interconnection and sense of collectivity between human, creature, animal, insects, flora, mineral, and bacterium, evokes an unfamiliar and new sense of hope. A future with the potential for transformation, the possibility of engagement, collaboration and resilience between humans and creatures. It captures the value of biodiversity and its essence in our ecosystem.
“Common Contemplation Extends to Prolongate Deeper into Themselves the Echo” is part of a new corpus which depicts utopic scenarios that narrate universes where we equally share spaces and values in an Ecocentric world and act as one entity in a restored equilibrium.
An interesting feature that’s not immediately noticeable: I am particularly interested in the motifs of spirals, circles, and curves. The composition is established with that underlying pattern. An assemblage of whales, birds, mermaids, and waves spirals around the character sitting in a boat. It creates a strange vortex which reflects on the idea of death, rebirth and life.
How the work reflects your practice as a whole: My practice takes interest in the interplay between humans, non-humans and technology through the lens of Theatrum Mundi, the baroque concept of the world as a grand stage. The narrations in my tableaux depict complex apocalyptic portrayals of our shared reality, evoking many catastrophes that saturate our common lived experience through drama, comedy, and tragedy.
Monsters, a recurring motif in my figurative vocabulary, offer a critique and an alternative to the omnipotence of machines as a default extension of human activity, given its destructive potential. Monsters and other supernatural beings such as ghosts, witches, mermaids, and aliens, populate my visual fields to represent the metaphysical world and offer a spiritual alternative to the horrors of our human-centric conditions.
My tableaux offer a meditation on how we collectively and individually respond to impending doom. Each tableau encapsulates a microcosm of our system of living to reflect on how individual actions can determine outcomes on a much larger scale and vice versa. Common Contemplation Extends to Prolongate Deeper into Themselves the Echo holds feelings of hope and empathy in an energetic balance.
One song that captures the work’s essence: Whale sounds.
