Latest Work (Since the Last Edition)
An homage to my favourite (but discontinued) webcomic, Todd Allison and the Petunia Violet in Long Con Magazine
A (print) poem in the Reconstructed Magazine Volume 2: Bodies
A short piece in Dirt Newsletter on Karen Blanchard’s exciting Youtube series, Where Did You Get That?
Two print poems in Cream City Review about various cruelties
I adore the natural world. Obsessed as I am with nature docuseries, hiking, and climate action, I’ve been inclined to download apps to help me identify rocks, birds, and plants. Of course, these names are useful as inventory for future poems, but mentally naming and describing flora and fauna helps root me in the moment. As a member of my biosphere, as How to Do Nothing author Jenny Odell advises, I should pay attention to the area that I inhabit–to reclaim my attention span and take responsibility over the effects of climate–by living and creating memories undisturbed by anything but the present.
And memory, of course, is not only sculpted by what is seen and accounted for, but also the factors of past as well as current emotions and thoughts. They’re flexible, changing slightly each time we recall them. A familiar bird call, the temperature of a similar summer, the exertion of the body, the time of day, and spring allergies all mutate the memories of our last trip to the park, to the river, to the beach. Even seemingly permanent landscapes such as forests, plains, bridges and buildings are newly colored by the retroactive lens of a present-day recall.
This idea is what drives Gulnaz Turdalieva’s series of sixty landscape abstracts as she transports the viewer to realities altered by memory and the senses. Color and texture star as characters in her moving, acrylic narratives sized 5" by 8". With a limited but exacting palette determining mood and her brushstrokes, movement, Turdalieva controls her landscapes and the viewer’s gaze with seeming ease, however clouded her lens of memory. Or perhaps the abstraction–the fantasy–of the landscapes are built into the memory, and the artist is inviting viewers through this emotional volatility into an investigation, a magnification, a close reading.
Turdalieva’s baroque color schemes portray the glut and gilt of these landscapes as they live in her memory. Although much of this series is a clear celebration of the lushness of forests, lakes, skies, and neighbourhoods with shining silver trees and warm gold skies, the artist’s earlier work in the series includes a striking black that invokes a sense of foreboding, drama, and mystery. These compositions have a heavier tone to them, and are less direct and more difficult to identify as landscapes akin to more traditional abstract work. They point to a methodology potentially reversed from the rest – memory here seeming to have guided the artist towards these settings.
Turdalieva distinguishes many landscapes with geometric strokes, defined shapes, and thin white outlines of fences, railroads, and trees, but some border on the fantastic. For example, #22 reminds me of a cloudy destination for space travel. Others present the destination as inside of the memory, presenting an elegant but sorrowfully distant figure (#33) or a swift hot collision (#30).
I admit that I’m infrequently moved by abstract art as I require guidance, setting, or just some clarity of meaning to engage my attention. Turdalieva, however, achieves the perfect balance of user-oriented direction and stimulating abstraction for viewers like me, and thus I bought some of her greeting cards. My favourite types of sceneries–mountains and water–are captured brilliantly in #48 and #54 respectively. The sophisticated luster of rock is presented as the viewer is guided between their jagged, arched outlines in #48, grounding me personally in the wondrous plurality of earth. #58 projects the bright clatter and thrash of waves that lead the eye further up to a glacial backdrop, invoking the pleasant sensations of entering cold water.
The artist also explores the distinct multiplicity of reality, most evidently in #28 (pictured beneath the title) with mountain-like shapes, pointed from the edges of the work to the top left corner, that overlay scenic horizontal layers transmuting hills to sky. This assertive two-layered work asks: what do you see, and what is true? Are there multiple perspectives involved simultaneously? What is occurring between your eyes and this tangible scenery? Look again: at this landscape, event, memory. The contrast of both demands you pay attention to both realities – whether either, or both, exist in the physical world.
In a few others, concurrency is the passageway towards the object of the memory. For example, in #17, chartreuse-green shards frame a brown mountain shape, or a veiled cobalt figure. What is truly the memory, and the landscape here? Should the viewer rest in their ambiguity? Does the object shift according to parallel perspectives, or another distorting recall? This work requests you to question even its frame of reference.
What is abstract art supposed to achieve? I wondered before setting eyes upon Turdalieva’s series, having only shallowly been affected by abstract art’s internal representations of the world. The artist presents a clear bridge between traditional abstraction and the outside world, perfect for those who also don’t quite get it. That bridge is memory, between the tangible and our experience of it, fraught with emotion and history. Whether interrogating or adorning what is seen, the malleability of memory is what gives purpose to each brushstroke in this series. Turdalieva’s work promises a new dimension to the natural world: one that is brightened by both caution and care.
One that takes what is beautiful and places it in our trembling hands.
Thank you for reading! This was my first time writing art criticism, so I'd love to hear your thoughts/feedback in the comments below, or privately.
If you liked this edition, please share and subscribe for more!