All images courtesy of the artist and the New Museum of Los Gatos.
Continuing through May 18, 2025
It seems these days that mankind is stampeding off the cliff at full speed like the proverbial lemmings. It is, however, slightly comforting to recognize that not all of our injuries are self-inflicted. Some are accidents, or fate, or the cycles of nature that we tend to ignore. Here in California, we deal with an ever-expanding wildfires season, and occasionally, at any given time, with earthquakes. On August 16, 2020, a thunderstorm that generated almost 11,000 lightning strikes ignited hundreds of fires in wooded parts of San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties. Three of the larger fires, urged by strong winds, combined into a super conflagration, labeled the CZU Lightning Complex Fires, so named according tp the terminology of local firefighters. Finally brought under control three months later, the 86,000-acre fire destroyed almost 1500 buildings, devastating entire communities. (Fortunately, the city of Santa Cruz and its University of California campus were saved.)
This is the back story to Mitra Fabian’s poignant installation, “Seeping Through Domestic Dissonance,” on view not far from the site of CZU devastation. Fabian, an Iranian-born artist who lives and works in the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains, was painfully impacted by the threats by fire, smoke, and water to her home, life, and livelihood. The Museum’s Spotlight Gallery is a small, cubic space with darkened walls and track lighting, suggestive of an intimate theater. Fabian decided to create an installation which could better express the enveloping sense of danger and dread than could conventional two- and three-dimensional objects. She created an enclosed space about 12 feet square composed of scorched boards that read as a ruined cabin or palisade but was festooned with strange forms that look like mutant mushrooms pierced by electronic hardware, the seeming survivors of some future Silicon Valley disaster.
It’s easy to enjoy post-apocalyptic movies when we’re not actually threatened. The safe catharsis these films provide palliates, at least for a couple of hours, some of our free-floating anxiety. Fabian’s haunted cabin of obsolete resistors, capacitors, and diodes, their metal wiring contrasting with their bright color coding, and the slip-cast sprouting fungal growths that have claimed and reanimated them, all serve as a warding-off of evil, an appeasing nod to the fire gods, as well as psychic grounding for traumatized disaster victims.
If Fabian’s fantasy mycology is unlikely to affect the current realities of real-estate development, with its perpetual, self-serving paeans to the indomitability of the human spirit, her fungi are unqualified successes aesthetically, both subverting and surpassing the mournful aspects of fires, human-caused or acts of God.
The smallish ceramic sculptures, all white or putty-colored except for the industrial elements that transfix them, are placed on the floor around the cabin, both inside and outside, lurking in the corners or prominently displayed at eye level and hung on the walls. The scorch marks contrast formally and emotionally with the weirdly humorous life-forms — egg cases, cocoons, wasp nests, or brains — from which mold-cast parts of other objects protrude: antlers, hooves, worms, tubes, tentacles. Airy lattice structures fashioned from electronic hardware seem to sprout and germinate. The idea of linking biomorphic creatures to a wooden structure originated in Fabian’s 2013 graphite-on-vellum drawing, “Tether,” in which curious headless creatures that resemble penguins have spikes emerging from some of them. Whether seen as penguins, bell peppers, or Woody Allen’s inflatable suit from “Sleeper,” the image is tied to a structure composed of wooden rods, floating like a kite above and behind them.
The effect is creepy and hilarious, like the mélange of human-machine hybrids from David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” or John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” Those inventions achieve much of their effect from movement, assisted by rapid-cut editing, and nerve-jangling gunfire and explosions. By contrast, Fabian’s devilish little menagerie of life forms remains unmoving, silent, and mysterious. They are all about Surrealist menace and humor, though thankfully without dramatic overkill. Says Fabian: “… my wild inventions that are simultaneously fungus, animal, and technology all rolled into one … are meant to be repulsive and mysterious while also being extravagant and elegant.” That is a target she generally hits.
All of the untitled pieces in Fabian’s haunted cabin play their roles within the metaphor of ruins invaded by an altered nature. Whether perched on sculpture pedestals or lining the gallery walls, in this age of re-imagined intellectual property these faux-porcelain vessels feel like a Wonderland mad tea set.
