To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
In a well-paired collaboration, photographer Jason Henthorne (2015 Arts Council Artist Grant Recipient) and earthscape artist Andres Amador work together to explore the truth and exhilaration of nature by capturing fleeting moments of beauty that navigate in the spaces between the worldly and otherworldly. Amador creates large-scale sand drawings and Henthorne documents these fleeting images. It's a loose collaboration to make Henthorne's visions a reality.
In contrast to his other works that picture beautiful, unadulterated seascapes that tend to eliminate traces of man, the implied hand of humanity in this body of work throws a new narrative into the mix. Staying with organic lines, “Oracle,” “Wired,” and “Ping” seem to mimic topography, winding pathways, and water rings, respectively. While alluring in their own right, the geometric patterns were most arresting in their sharp, stark corners that seem to poke at the tranquil ocean.
In the middle ground of most scenes, dark boulders act as figures bathing in the water, at once soothing paired with a persistent sense of something else, something not a little unsettling in that unknown.
The overall calmness of these photographs is uprooted when watching the progress video of how these earthworks are made. Watching Amador retrace his lines after every wave laps away at his progress is a true lesson in futility, but also persistence. The performative aspect of the work is most compelling as it truly hits on impermanence — of mankind and nature — in a more direct way. While I can appreciate the beauty of these works in alignment with transcendence, we’re at a moment in time where it’s almost impossible to think about the land without the repercussions of our manipulation of it.
In light of the recent Extracted group exhibition at USF CAM, these works serve as counterbalance. Whereas those works showed the explicit removal and elimination of nature for our benefit through conceptual approaches, Henthorne exposes the ways nature reclaims its agency using beauty as an effective method to achieve emotional appeal. Just as the oceans wash trash back on shore, regurgitating our pollution back at us, nature proves that it has ways of erasing the steps humanity has made in efforts of so-called development. In the grand scheme of geological time, humanity is just a speck of dust on the timeline, but the earth has and always will be a constant.
Though the photographs are a prosthetic to the momentary experiences of the tides washing away makes made in the sand, it’s the point Emerson was making about each moment being as unique as the next, never to be replicated again — and in Henthorne’s works, the fragility of life is duly noted in each erased footstep along the beach.
Henthorne: Between Worlds
HCC Ybor Gallery in the Performing Arts Building, first floor, Palm Avenue & 15th Street, Ybor City.
Through Jan. 31. hccfl.edu/yborgallery.
This article appears in Jan 12-19, 2017.