It is almost psychedelic to look at the Earth so closely. You almost can’t recognize it. And as much as we talk about the changing of the climate (heat waves in Europe, fires in California, melting ice caps north and south), there is still this almost supernatural presence of the landscapes around us, and a continual obsession and fasciation by artists. It’s like a dedication and duty to show the evolution of the landscapes around us, a baton passed down by generation after generation of painters and visual artists.
Night Gallery opened Rare Earth this summer, a group show of 34 artists across their spaces in downtown Los Angeles, that is a major overview of the moment and continuation of their 2022 group show Shrubs. What I found interesting about that show was that it felt like a necessary conversation in a post-pandemic wake-up, like we were all gathering ourselves to live once again on the treadmill of modernity and that we needed to remind ourselves of the pause we just had. Rare Earth feels like a call to action, a conversation amongst peers, something unspoken. Not unlike the idea of rare earth minerals, the commodity of commerce and so much of our political conversations over the past decade, the combination of what is spoken and unspoken in both the earth and art is hard to deny here. It’s a fantastic curatorial concept.
The earth has always been the first canvas — and artists, generation after generation, keep returning to it, not to repeat what came before, but to see it anew through their own eyes and their own time. And long before we named what we were doing, we were grinding the earth into color and pressing it against a surface — trying to say something that words couldn't hold. There is a lot to unpack in Rare Earth, and so much to see. —Evan Pricco
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