Ilana Manolson – Time: In the Mountains

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Ilana Manolson, “Current, (detail),” no date

acrylic on yupo., 69” x 75” (courtesy of the Museum)

Time: In the Mountains strives to capture the different heartbeats of the earth over time, observed by Ilana Manolson while painting, hiking, and working in the Rocky Mountains. A distinguished painter, printmaker, and naturalist who has been shown in galleries throughout North America, Manolson combines her talents here to create visually confounding and expansive works that unfurl like rivers, trails, and scrolls.

Unrolling to reveal the story as it goes, these scrolls effectively use the layering of mediums and materials to create a visual narrative for the viewer to follow. The only repeated detail lies in painted marks embedded in the work that act as a kind of EKG-like rhythm depicting the heartbeat of the Earth. Based on the Schumann Resonance, a magnetic tone found in Earth’s ionosphere, this heartbeat has recently started to increase in pace, indicating to Manolson that damage is being done to the Earth’s health.

Using these marks and pools of paint to transform landscapes into equivalencies of tenacious life in which some species thrive and others disappear, Manolson manipulates the fluidity of her medium and it becomes a metaphor for the resurgence and the dying. She celebrates the natural world and its ineffable mysteries, even as we are aware of potential disasters. Even in the coming apart, there is great beauty.