Constance Mallison
Still Life in a Landscape, 2018
Signed and dated 2018
Oil on Canvas
14 in. x 56 in.
The discarded contents found on city streets are not often associated with the sublime, but in Constance Mallinson’s paintings, the manufactured and natural detritus are rendered at a disturbing scale. Depicting a fantastical assortment of decaying plant material and post-consumer items collected on her daily walks through Los Angeles, Mallison deftly interweaves these found objects in mountainous accumulations offset by darkened backgrounds and glimpses of earth to suggest trash dumps, ocean gyres, and clogged urban alleyways. The rich details, brilliant colors, and variety of objects and perspectives are rooted in 17th-century Dutch still-life painting and Cubist collage; thick painterly passages within the predominantly figurative compositions further the conversation with Modernist abstraction and upend rational narratives of progress. At once critical and celebratory, viewers must wrestle with unresolved conflicts in Mallinson’s work: beauty, abjection, environmental degradation wrought by unbridled consumption, disposable culture, and even the role of art, as suggested by the painterly gestures. Unlike the historical sublime landscape iconography that justified ecological exploitation, Mallinson’s massive array of 21st century waste reveals the dilemmas resulting from the domination of nature. Offering a sublime experience that promotes a consciousness concerning the demise of the environment, she implies that even ruination can yield new possibilities.