Deep Water Horizons

The plain white of the gallery emitted a feeling of sterility and an unnerving stillness, while the hanging canvases, floating in midair, only served to add to the surrealism I feel as I entered the room. I found myself enthralled by the stark simplicity of the exhibition before me; the research that I had done beforehand and the expectations it provided definitely did not mesh with what I found in the University Art Gallery this afternoon. The white noise of the room, free of clutter or complication to random passerby, gave a sense of the quiet before the storm. The simplistic black on white of the outward facing canvases made it seem as if the artist’s world would be portrayed cleanly and straightforwardly, but as I walked around the circle trying to piece together what the letters said, I found that everything was broken and unreadable; there were only fragments of words and letters. This was the first sign that things were now what they appeared to be.

This solo exhibition, entitled “Deep Water Horizons” by Hans Weigand is currently on display at the University Art Gallery in UC San Diego. Weigand presents his documentation of local scenery and landscapes come crashing together with the digital media of contemporary pop culture. Walking into the octagon of hanging paintings, the audience is immediately thrust into a chaotic dystopia sharply in contrast to the unnerving calm of the outside canvas. The eight paintings each showcase, in panoramic form, coastal scenes in various states of destruction and disarray as nature comes into contact with digitally imposed images of manmade technology.

A sense of unease pervaded from these images, but it seemed not to come about from what seemed to be, on the surface, the destruction of nature by man, as is usually the case in modern issues, but rather the downfall of human society alongside with nature. One paintings that stood out to me featured the Pantheon and other pieces reminiscent of the Roman empire next to the Statue of Liberty as both crumbled into a crashing wave as a gorilla stood almost smugly in the foreground. Two of the strongest empires of their times are shown as completely overtaken by nature both symbolically and literally: the landmarks are unnatural in their graphic interpretation, looking pasted onto the artist’s brushstrokes and being taken over by harsh streaks of paint while what they symbolize is the imminent fall of those in great power and human society as a whole. The theme of not belonging and the unnatural placement of two completely opposing subjects was recurring not just in this pollution of manmade architecture in nature but also in the animals and people in habitats that are not their own. Weigand references two outlandish pieces of pop culture--two characters that were thrust into places were they were seen as strange and dangerous. King Kong and the Silver Surfer are highly influential in the artist’s work and expose the theme of isolation through their role as the last living beings in a dystopian world.

Weigand’s work is described as a “data tsunami” of digitized images and paint in three layers. The first uses paint as the main medium, playing with different light parameters in day or night atmospheres with thick, streaking brushstrokes. It seems to have a more nostalgic feel of times before digital media became the main medium of modern artists, as Weigand shows in his second layer featuring the data and pop culture of carefully measured seascapes, architecture, and environmental subjects over the paint. Finally, the artist throws in his third and last layer as the “revenge of paint” on the digitized media that is featured not only in his work but also in modern life. The dark colors and smears of paint are prominent and taking back the focus from the unnatural sterility of the digital pieces.

Walking out of the circle of canvases, I was again faced with the canvas of “welcoming” phrases, broken and painted in their plain, old-timey font against their deceptively simple background. The feeling of uneasiness lingered, evidence of Weigand’s power of expression through a simple combination of pieces, no words needed. Other gallery visitors wandered through, and the exhibition’s “tsunami of data” left its final impression on me as I stood on the outside looking in; from a distance, the people inside the circle appeared caught inside the eye of the digitized storm, the images around them showing the catastrophe of the hurricane around them while the white canvas enclosed around the last survivors of human society.