A Tangled Coexistence

Johansson Projects presents A Tangled Coexistence, an exhibition by the Northern California based painter and draftswoman Nicole Irene Anderson. A Tangled Coexistence is Anderson’s first solo show with the gallery and invokes the tradition of landscape painting to explore questions of land, home, and the psychological impact of expansion in California.

Nicole Irene Anderson’s tautly constructed drawings and paintings of atomized, flattened landscapes and desolate suburban streets are exquisite scenarios of unease. Deploying her accomplished formal language — exacting, deliberate, dry — Anderson composes essential works charged with feeling and moral complexity. Working from equal parts memory, observation, and invention, Anderson lays siege to our nerves with plausible realities haunted by anxiety and loneliness yet shimmering with the phenomenological glint-glare of light.

A native Californian, Anderson draws from the greed and violence of western expansion, the cool appraisal of our stewardship of land, our elaborate rationalizations and dependence for everything on somebody else, and her empathy for what land both offers and requires of us. Her scope for action is nourished by delicately nuanced drawing and the painter’s belief in the power of form. Weaving in and out of diverse perspectives like strategic lane changes, Anderson’s works explore the intersection of the specific and the abstract. Her itinerary lands the viewer in the immersive space of the world’s core, where the horizon is lost or abandoned, where the body stops, and reverie begins. Devoid of human presence, Anderson’s thinly brushed works implicate the spaces and elements beyond the limits of the scene itself, leaving you alone to speculate on transformation and presence, and to let memory speak.