Transitory Nature, Jeri Coppola and Shirley Irons

May 18 - June 29, 2019
CAS Arts Center
48 Main Street, Livingston Manor, New York

Landscape is such a familiar trope that it can get worn out pretty quickly and cause yawns when the word is mentioned. Even so, against all we know about the artificiality of landscape, the man-madeness of it, there is a desire to escape back to that imaginary Eden, when nature was all and perfect. Both Jeri Coppola and Shirley Irons use photography, painting, books and sculpture to simultaneously include and exclude that desire. They both use light, actual or represented, to create a sense of spirit, a sense of hope, and they both use repetition to keep that sense of spirit away from reference to the sublime or grandiose that images from nature can evoke. Distance, literal and figurative, is important to both. Jeri Coppola's subjects are infinite things: water, wind, industrial landscape, which she erases, white washes, distresses and presents in unfamiliar structures – light boxes on shipping palettes, hugely oversized books, and occasionally incorporating glassine casts of her body. Shirley Irons looks at landscape as a cultural invention that can include highways, airports, gas stations, architecture and everyday objects. They become portraits of how we live. Both artists rely on photography for its suggestion of the real, both acknowledge the transitory nature of our world, and both look to slow down and escape from the noise of the overload of images that is our reality.