CHEMOSYNTHESIS
TARA ANNE DALBOW
FEB 2023 | ISSUE 21
The word yes is too short. From now on, the word for yes is chemosynthesis.
What I can tell you is that the ocean looks white today, not blue. Albedo.
The man out there isn’t my husband, but my husband is out there.
Chemosynthesis occurs when there is no other option, which is to say when there is no light left.
He was straight off ten days on a troller when we met in a wet bar. When we kissed, his mouth tasted medieval and his sandpaper cheeks turned my face red for two weeks.
The discovery of chemosynthesis was the most significant discovery in the field of oceanography during the twentieth century, so much so that we say, before 1977 and after 1977. Before chemosynthesis and after chemosynthesis.
I am living post-chemosynthesis. I am living on what, before 1977, we didn’t think could ever be enough.
When I say we, I mean we oceanographers; I mean myself and those who did return from their fieldwork. Who did not move into a drafty brick house with a fisherman who was sure he could stop fishing.
I hate to watch, but I can never look away. I always seem to catch it no matter what I have planned for the day. The moment just before his head is fully submerged and the moment his head is fully submerged.
The man who is the light has been gone for too many nights. There’s no fish in the ice chest and hardly any water in the well. According to the red x’s on the calendar by the door, he’s been gone for three weeks.
I have watched him drown and come back to life 3,000 times. I’ve watched and I’ve waited, night after night.
Three weeks and thirty years ago, he held my red face between his rough hands and filled me entirely. Thirty years ago, he said he’d stop living the way he’d been living—on ships fighting against the sea. Thirty years ago, I said yes to honey in my whiskey.
Yes before I understood that decisions should be made in a span longer than it takes to say yes. Before, I understood that just because we don’t need light to survive doesn’t mean we should try to survive without light. Before, I understood that dark surfaces absorb far more than they return.
The truth is, he didn’t even have to ask. The truth is, I didn’t even say yes. I nodded my head, and that was that; I moved in the next day.
At 3:30 pm, I pour his tea down the drain. If they aren’t in by 3:00, they aren’t coming in. The fly that died in the curdled cream sticks to the side of the silver sink, and for a moment, I believe he’s still alive.
He lasted three months amongst the trees. Learned to plane wood and blow glass. The man could do anything with his hands, but the man couldn’t breathe on dry land. He said, don’t you see, after booking a job that would keep him away for weeks. That night, I stared and stared but couldn’t find his face in the dark, even though he was lying just beside me.
I free the fly with a spoon and place him on the counter, where nothing moves besides the light from his eyes.
People need to eat, he answered when I asked if he still thinks of me when he’s at sea.
Giant tube worms at the bottom of the ocean contain a particular bacterium that oxidizes sulfur, transforming it into something they can consume for energy. The worms evolved until they could fulfill their own needs. For thousands of years, they tried and failed until one day, something inside me changed, and I couldn’t wait.
For thirty years, I tried and failed to make myself eat, but what cannot be filled remains empty.
The porch lights burn two eyes into the churning face outside. I imagine going to him. I imagine his arms around my belly. And just like that, relief pours through me like honey.
I wrap the white blanket around my shoulders and unlock the glass door, sliding it to the right. As I step onto the deck, the wind pours inside rearranges the room, returning everything to where it was before I arrived.
When his voice cuts through the wind and my name follows from the open door, I know I’m confusing his voice with the voice of the waves.
Before he left, the first time he left, he gave me the abandoned body of an animal that once lived hundreds of miles from shore, told me to hold it to my ear when I missed the sound of his breathing.
As I walk toward the sea, the blanket stretches like a shadow overhead, then waves in surrender before plunging into the water at the exact spot where we’ll meet.
All those nights, I lay with a hollow shell pressed to my head, and only now can I hear his voice as if he were here. I press the palms of my hands to the shells of my ears and refuse to return to the home he’d long overgrown.
Another step and a skyblack tide rushes in to fill what’s empty. Diffusion.
Bore up by the swell, I float for a moment, poised evenly between sea and sky, past and present, full and empty.
When his face appears, illuminated by a sudden light emanating from no possible source but me, I catch his eye, nod my head, and as the crest begins to curl, open my mouth to say yes
please send inquiries, ideas, book recommendations, and love notes to: taraannedalbow@gmail.com
cy twombly's bookshelves photograph by tacita dean
select sweet nothings
I don't know if I have ever felt more seen as a painter than right this moment having read your essay. It's so beautiful. I feel humbled by your generous words and just so deeply honored. WOW~!!!! Just wow!! Thank you soo soo much!!! --H
This is great!!! Elegant, poetic, vivid, informed, rich, energizing, cut from the same cloth as the paintings and puts words to the heart of them while keeping things open ended, free, humming. I'm honored, truly. Thank you for spending time with the work and sharing these thoughts. So happy that it resonates in this way for you, and helps to clarify / articulate many things for me. --S
YOU. ARE. UNREAL.I actually almost cried. Thank you so much Tara!! I owe you a big meal and my first born child...Literally no notes though. Your writing makes me want to go paint more :P --C
Tara, this essay is incredible! I have never had someone write for or about me with so much care and understanding. I really really love this text! Thank you thank you thank you I'm so excited to have your essay accompanying my work for this show!! --S
I love it! It needs zero changes and thank you!!! Being able to sit and talk made a huge difference, you’ve explained what I’m getting at better than I have to myself so mission accomplished! --B
This is the best thing anyone has ever written about my work. You nailed it! I couldn’t be happier! A lot of times these things are uninteresting and a bit boring…and a lot of times too technical. The way you write is highly enjoyable and I think people will get a kick out of it. Excellent job! --J
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The question is not, who are you; but what are you in Brian Robertson’s newest body of work. We are, despite all our efforts to conceal it, animals. Animals, whose behaviors are determined, in large part, by a complex series of chemical reactions. “We’re blind to our blindness,” says psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the difficulty of knowing ourselves. Feels attempts to shed light on this condition by depicting the chemicals and proteins responsible for many of our reactions, impressions, and feelings. The eleven hyper-realist, black-and-white portraits in this exhibition feature the artist’s friends wearing their regular clothes against a solid black backdrop. The primary difference between these portraits and those of the 15th-century masters? The subject’s heads are replaced by scientifically accurate renderings of various chemical compounds. Helixes of estrogen, orbs of dopamine, and spiraling strands of testosterone emerge from the collars of leather jackets, white T-shirts, and sweatshirts.
The question is not, who are you; but what are you in Brian Robertson’s newest body of work. We are, despite all our efforts to conceal it, animals. Animals, whose behaviors are determined, in large part, by a complex series of chemical reactions. “We’re blind to our blindness,” says psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the difficulty of knowing ourselves. Feels attempts to shed light on this condition by depicting the chemicals and proteins responsible for many of our reactions, impressions, and feelings. The eleven hyper-realist, black-and-white portraits in this exhibition feature the artist’s friends wearing their regular clothes against a solid black backdrop. The primary difference between these portraits and those of the 15th-century masters? The subject’s heads are replaced by scientifically accurate renderings of various chemical compounds. Helixes of estrogen, orbs of dopamine, and spiraling strands of testosterone emerge from the collars of leather jackets, white T-shirts, and sweatshirts.
Rendered at this scale and in Robertson’s signature photorealist style, the organic structures appear alien, monstrous, and artificial. An effect that echoes sociologist George Simmel’s observation that “coming closer to things often only shows us how far away from us they still are.” That the weave of the sweater, the fuzziness of the fleece, and the folds of the cotton, appear more organic and human than the molecules that make up the building blocks of life underscores the earlier assertion that we are mostly ignorant of what’s happening inside ourselves and others.
The disconnect between exterior and interior, reality and appearances, is dramatized by the subversion of expectations and the scope and scale of the contrasting elements. In Gut Feeling and Cold Feet, sinister systems of nerves emerge from a sweater with an embroidered happy face and buttoned-up dress shirt, respectively. The uncanny juxtaposition of familiar and foreign throws the limits of appearance to reflect truth into stark relief. In a society that privileges sight over every other sense, it’s easy to forget that what we see is neither the whole picture nor objective reality. In externalizing otherwise hidden processes, the possibility of incongruity between presentation and substance becomes apparent and, along with it, the difficulty of discerning between the two.
Replacing the brain, the organ primarily associated with consciousness and rational thought, with various organic structures, Robertson challenges the assumption that we are entirely in control of our thoughts and actions. In privileging chemical compounds and proteins, the viewer is asked to reckon with the biological fact that, similarly to animals, many of our behaviors are automated, instinctual, and unconscious. “Chemicals and proteins, reacting to their environment without our knowledge or consent, determine what we feel,” explains the artist. In other words, the decisions we make, what we say, do, and decide, even on the level of the clothes we wear, are byproducts of an infinite number of chemical reactions we not only can’t control but can’t understand.
That the people who sat for these portraits are friends of the artist incites the question: if we can’t see ourselves, then how can we see others? While the compounds appear to belong to the person sitting for the portrait, they were, in fact, assigned by Robertson. That he chose estrogen to represent the friend featured in All Wound Up or a serotonin carrier protein for the friend in Hedone tells us more about the artist than it does the subject. In Hug Dealer, a female in a paint-covered sweatshirt sits with her body angled toward the artist, poised above her shoulders a bulbous neurotransmitter, one responsible for reducing nerve activity associated with stress and fear. Whether the neurotransmitter’s role as a calming agent reveals something about the artist’s estimation of the subject’s interior world, the artist’s feelings about them, or their relationship is impossible to discern. In this way, the paintings function as quasi-self-portraits or perhaps renderings of the center of a Venn diagram, the space where one subjective projection overlaps with another.
While we may not be able to trust appearances, it’s abundantly clear that the technical precision employed in the production of these paintings could only have come from a masterful hand and the ambition of the ideas from a carefully cultivated mind. That eleven medium-sized works could incite so many questions about human nature is a testament to Robertson’s remarkable ability to synthesize complex concepts and render them in paint. When asked if he’s found answers to the questions he posed, he says he’s only found more questions. Echoing Simmel’s earlier sentiment, Robertson affirms that, “new insights always lead to greater mysteries.”
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Adam Beris is breaking out of the grid. What began as a happy accident back in Kansas City when a friend gave him a box of old paints has become, over the last few years, Beris’ signature, highly recognizable style. Organized in exacting rows across the canvas, Beris renders familiar glyphs, objects, symbols, and faces, in an entirely unexpected way. Applying pigment straight from the tube onto the canvas, he creates tangible objects, sculptural in nature, that challenge our understanding of the production and presentation of painting.
Adam Beris is breaking out of the grid. What began as a happy accident back in Kansas City when a friend gave him a box of old paints has become, over the last few years, Beris’ signature, highly recognizable style. Organized in exacting rows across the canvas, Beris renders familiar glyphs, objects, symbols, and faces, in an entirely unexpected way. Applying pigment straight from the tube onto the canvas, he creates tangible objects, sculptural in nature, that challenge our understanding of the production and presentation of painting.
After graduating from Kansas City Art Institute with a dual degree in Painting and Creative Writing, the artist had seen enough of what he didn’t want to do: flat figurative representations and familiar gestural abstractions. In the spirit of resisting his formal training and diverging from the popular styles of the time, Beris developed an approach to painting that both emphasized the materiality of his medium, oil paint, and challenged the common perspective of the picture plane. The tension between the excrescent goopiness of the icons, and the precision of the grids they are organized within, call attention to Beris’ dominance over his material, a notoriously difficult paint to control.
Upon seeing the grids for the first time, one feels compelled to decode or translate the meanings behind their complex lexicons. “People always want to know what they mean,” says Beris. “They don’t mean anything.” Rather than trying to decipher the intent behind the arrangements, Beris wants people to generate their own narratives and interpretations. In this way, the works become almost like Rorschach Tests, where each viewer sees themselves and their own tastes, assumptions, and experiences reflected back toward them.
To this point, Beris insists that he doesn’t lay them out first. He starts with a blank canvas and, one by one, fills it with objects. To see each icon as distinctive and devoid of pre-determined, relational meaning is to see them as physical objects lined up on a shelf, more precisely, Beris’ possessions lined up on Beris’ shelf. If Gustave Flaubert is correct in saying that the objects we are attracted to are not haphazard, but are material expressions of something intangible but essential to our souls, then what we’re seeing before we project ourselves upon them are pieces of Beris’ soul--pieces the artist himself doesn’t exactly understand. “Painting is more than just colors and shapes and aesthetic choices,” Beris says. “There’s a mystery to painting. It sounds cheesy, but paintings really do function as windows into someone’s soul.”
While Beris is committed to maintaining that sense of mystery for himself and his audience, he admits that a few icons point toward pieces of his soul that he’s more conscious of including, such as abstract allusions to contemporary and canonical artists whose works inspire and inform his process. One can find nods to Ellsworth Kelly and Hilma af Klint among others, nestled between cacti, rainbows, and tennis balls. Other references to the history and practice of artmaking include cigarettes, pieces of fruit, and miniature landscapes. Others draw attention to the act of perception itself, like bulging eyes and geometric cubes.
Whether a product of randomness or unconscious evidence of Beris being a serious artist as well as a man with the sense of humor of an irreverent teenage boy, specific arrangements lend themselves to more apparent interpretations. It’s hard to miss the pair of breasts with nipples resembling the mathematical sign beside them in Navy Blue Sedan. Or the two men staring at each other in Window II, an orange Cheeto between them. When a swirl of poop is plopped beside the artist’s initials, the placement reads as evidence of the artist’s tendency toward self-depreciation and a willingness to poke fun at his more grandiose ideas about artmaking.
To see this selection of work together is to see a snapshot of the artist’s process. Beginning with vibrant color fields, he moves toward the eventual inclusion of a horizon line, with gradients, formal experimentations, and the inclusion of inanimate objects, along the way. The progression bespeaks a commitment to refinement, innovation, mastery of craft, and a refusal to stagnate. In this way, the emergence of a landscape in the most recent painting in the show seems to symbolize Beris painting his way out of the grid.
Redirecting the same resistance he aimed at the formality of his university training back onto himself, Beris is ready again to push the limits of his practice and his paint. While it’s safe to assume the physicality of his materials will continue to be front and center, what’s next is still mysterious, which is precisely how he wants it—with plenty of space for the work to emerge on its own terms. Beris says he’s ready for messy and a little more freedom. Freedom to paint outside the lines, or in this case, the grid.
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Skulls are commonly considered a morbid symbol, a reminder of our mortality and the transitory nature of human existence. In modern society, a skull is most often used to denote poison, danger, or impending threat. A phenomenon that perhaps bespeaks our collective strained relationship with death or lack thereof. However, in ancient times, cultures from Mesoamerica to the Middle East celebrated the skeletal emblem, considering it as much, if not more, a reminder of life, resurrection, and prosperity. All the way into the 14th and 15th centuries, the skull sat firmly between memento mori and carpe diem.