{"id":9366,"date":"2018-11-21T08:16:39","date_gmt":"2018-11-21T13:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=9366"},"modified":"2018-11-21T08:21:05","modified_gmt":"2018-11-21T13:21:05","slug":"erony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/11\/21\/erony\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Lost in America\u2019 With Susan Erony: \u2018It\u2019s So Easy To Think Apocalyptically Now\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhere in the world did I ever get the idea that people are supposed to be good?\u201d The line is obsessively printed hundreds of times in one of the artworks in Gloucester artist Susan Erony<\/a>\u2019s exhibition \u201cLost in America\u201d<\/a> at Trident Gallery in Gloucester from Oct. 27 to Nov. 25.<\/p>\n

For decades, Erony (a friend of mine) has created poetic and haunted works that address eugenics, lost homes, safe places, tanks, Towers of Babel, the Holocaust, the writings of Franz Kafka and Charles Olson, people \u201cdisappeared\u201d by the right wing military dictatorship that began ruling Chile in the 1970s. She\u2019s sought to understand evil in our societies. Her art sits in a mournful place where her hope that art might bring enlightenment that could help heal the world is challenged by all those grim realities: Where did I get the idea that people are supposed to be good?<\/p>\n

\"Detail<\/a>
Detail of Susan Erony “Where in the World,” 2018, acrylic transfer, acrylic, and burnt paper on canvas. (Courtesy Trident Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In this new exhibition, Erony speaks of refugees, of environmental destruction, of scorched World War I battlefields, of the rubble left after wars. The title piece, \u201cLost in America\u201d 2018, composed of acrylic, pencil and burnt paper, might call to mind a river delta seen from space. For Erony, it\u2019s an image of war. \u201cI kept drawing these paths through these battlefields and they kept winding up as dead ends,\u201d Erony tells me. \u201cI cannot believe what\u2019s going on in America and how bad it is. That\u2019s what the work is about. It\u2019s just one issue after another.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Susan<\/a>
Susan Erony “Lost in America,” 2018, acrylic, burnt paper, and pencil on paper. (Courtesy Trident Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Erony favors palettes of charred blacks and led grays, parched tans and rusty browns in her paintings and collages of photos, textiles, old book pages and her signature medium of burnt paper. She says she began adding encrustations of ashes to her art in 1996, inspired by their \u201calchemical\u201d feeling\u2014but they also call to mind scorched earth campaigns, ruins, cinders, the ovens of the Nazi death camps.<\/p>\n

Her painting \u201cMy Father Was a Refugee\u201d is a symbolic portrait of her father behind a barricade. It\u2019s intended to evoke her own family history as well as the demonization of immigrants and refugees in the United States today.<\/p>\n

Erony grew up in Brookline. In addition to being an artist, Erony has been a teacher, curator, psychotherapist, activist and, lately, a volunteer aiding refugee families from Afghanistan and Syria<\/a>\u2014with school, landlords, learning English.<\/p>\n

Her mother\u2019s parents and her father were Jewish refugees from murderous pogroms in the Ukraine. \u201cAlthough I grew up in a Jewish family, with a Russian father who lost four siblings in pogroms, was arrested twice and barely made it out of the country, the history of the Jews was not discussed in my home,\u201d Erony said in 1998<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Susan<\/a>
Susan Erony “My Father was a Refugee,” 2018, paper, painted aluminum, and acrylic on canvas. (Courtesy Trident Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cMy father was a very traumatized man,\u201d Erony tells me. \u201cAll he wanted was to be safe.\u201d Her immigrant relatives \u201call loved the United States, the country that had saved their lives, and never thought of its flaws because they paled in comparison with those they had experienced before,\u201d she writes on her website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re all rolling in their graves. That\u2019s all I can say. That\u2019s all I can think,\u201d Erony now says. \u201cWhen the kids were being put into detention and separated from their parents at the border [last summer] \u2026 I had this line going in my head: My father is rolling in his grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Susan<\/a>
Susan Erony “False god,” 2018, photographs, acrylic, printed paper, burnt paper, charcoal, and Cont\u00e9 crayon on canvas. (Courtesy Trident Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cFalse God\u201d uses paint, photographs, burnt paper and Conte crayon to depict a silvery nose hovering over train tracks that dead end in hillocks of dry grass. It was inspired by the false nose that the 16th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe wore after his nose was lopped off in a duel, and Brahe\u2019s struggles to understand the universe. Erony describes it as \u201ca fake nose on a man searching for the truth.\u201d It\u2019s about, \u201cWhat is truth and what we do as humans with truth as we see it. \u2026 That morphed into an idea about false gods and the way Trump\u2019s following is like a cult. We have always looked for gods to save us and it hasn\u2019t worked.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Susan<\/a>
Susan Erony “Growth,” 2018, pencil, burnt paper, and acrylic on paper. (Courtesy Trident Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cGrowth\u201d employs pencil, paint and burnt paper to depict a spiky tree and, underground, a mushroom cloud of roots. \u201cThings are changing so much because of climate change and what it\u2019s going to mean for the things we see,\u201d Erony says. \u201c\u2026There\u2019s going to be some kind of evolution. I\u2019m so intrigued about what that might be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Erony continues, \u201cWhen I look at that tree I see all kinds of evil that is leading to these new changes, these new growths, these new evolutions that are being so sped up by us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Susan<\/a>
Susan Erony “Rubble,” 2018, oil on canvas. (Courtesy Trident Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Her oil painting \u201cRubble\u201d shows heaps of bricks. \u201cI thought it was time for the Towers [of Babel] to start crumbling. Really at this point they\u2019re ruins,\u201d Erony says. \u201cI ended up building this city of piles of bricks and a wall. It\u2019s so easy to think apocalyptically now. This piece is really about aftermath.\u201d<\/p>\n

She recalls histories she\u2019s heard of German women recycling bricks from shattered buildings at the end of World War II. \u201cThey would clean the bricks and not talk. All you would hear is the bricks going down the line, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe end of the world is in here. The amount of destruction we\u2019ve caused,\u201d Erony says. \u201c\u2026Is this what it\u2019s going to look like in our country if we keep going the way we\u2019re going?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut there\u2019s a comforting thought, just the nature, she just reclaims everything, she does what she does,\u201d Erony says. \u201c\u2026 I\u2019m grabbing at straws. What can I tell you. There\u2019s new grass there. \u2026 I want part of my art to be about new growth that can happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"Susan<\/a>
Susan Erony “Gertrude and Me,” 2018, acrylic, acrylic transfer, and crocheted linen thread on canvas. (Courtesy Trident Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Susan<\/a>
Susan Erony “Where in the World,” 2018, acrylic transfer, acrylic, and burnt paper on canvas. (Courtesy Trident Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhere in the world did I ever get the idea that people are supposed to be good?\u201d The line is obsessively printed hundreds of times in one of the artworks in Gloucester artist Susan Erony\u2019s exhibition \u201cLost in America\u201d at Trident Gallery in Gloucester from Oct. 27 to Nov. 25. For decades, Erony (a friend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9378,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[35,481,422,482],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9366"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9366"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9384,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9366\/revisions\/9384"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}