The Brooklyn Rail

The collection of the Amon Carter Museum is, like all museums, a structure and operation of looking. The impending darkness of George Inness’s Approaching Storm shows the delineation of the land, the distinct boundaries between domesticated parcels that run against the wild and the undesigned prairie beyond the ravines that separate them. We see indigeneity represented through the eyes of Charles M. Russell and George Catlin nearby, who were captivated by the hunt, but less observant of the ancestral knowledge that kept the landscape vibrant. There are revealing inclusions such as a stereograph that makes the inviting landscapes of the frontier appear in three dimensions, and Mark Dion’s cabinet of curiosity of Texas history—both shown nearby. James Prosek’s show Trespassers reorients the subject of the Amon Carter Museum to the Texas prairie tall grass. Knowing full well that we implicate ourselves when we observe something, that the gaze reduces both what is seen and who envisions it, Prosek returns to the earth in a post-humanist strategy of subject building—perceiving secluded worldings, where Galleta grows in the Edwards Plateau, and where Turk’s-cap Lilies bloom within the Blackland Prairie.

Prosek’s exhibition attempts to engage with the non-human subjectivity of grass and the ecologies it sustains. It is a sensuous aesthetic, a pacing that synthesizes the carefulness of observational painting with the slow expanses of time found within foraging and gleaning from the natural cycles of the land. In his attentive watercolors that exist somewhere in between a field journal and ecological portraiture, the artist hits his stride. The leaves of a great coneflower notices and then reveals to have been eaten through by insects. The Texas Indian Paintbrush and other Paintbrush grasses are recurring motifs throughout. It seems an irresistible connection to draw for the artist, as a point of naming that develops an indexical relationship between the natural world and the world of an artist. It is also a moment of Prosek’s finest painting—the lightness of his mark spirals and bounces like the broken stalks they depict winding in the wind. Along the bottom of each drawing are field notes as to where and when each sample was found—the bluffs outside of Saint Jo, Texas or the Thomson Prairie. In other works, Prosek draws connections to the ways in which the plants of the grasslands are utilized—how the wood of the Bois D’Arc tree was used for bows and to build hundreds of miles of fences to divide up the land.

Prosek handles each specimen as an observational painting; and also realizes them at 1:1 scale. Rather than dealing with each collection as a singular piece, he installs them in separate frames hung in archipelagic arrangements. This both addresses the real scale of each ephemeral find, while also operating as a reminder of our contrived gaze. In one of his Indian Paintbrush paintings, included with switchgrass and clymer meadow, the Paintbrush expands through multiple sheets of paper and contiguous frames that segment the curls of its stem. The Paintbrush is a hemiparasitic grass, which makes this depiction of invasive spread even more effective and considered.

The complicated facsimile of depiction and realization in nature is most remarkably in Prosek’s sculpture. The hand painted flowers blooming out of iron casts of burned logs reach a simulacral forgery of the original—a clone stamping of nature in watercolor and clay that achieves a quality of the uncanny equal to the Blaschka glassworks in the Yale Art Collection. Each copper effigy of burned logs grows grass from the splintering craquelure of its burns—Prairie Paintbrush and Antelope Horns Milkweed. There is both translation and vibration to them, of art performing as nature and the museum performing as a nature lab; a tension building from artifice that generates the complexity of art and nature’s attraction and distance.

To engage with Texas means tangling with the complicated structures of the land and the complicated desires formed within the frontier, its preservation and development. There is too often an insistence on a cultural memory that neglects the importance of the indigenous life forms that gave shape and character to the land. The Dallas–Fort Worth area is rapidly expanding. The land of the Southwest and Northeast—where the artist is from—have a different scale of time. The prairie grass has evolved to survive a desert. Dark marl and chalky clay bury and build new cycles of life and death that frustrate our understandings of ownership, and preserve the indigenous knowledge of living with the land. Prosek reorients the subject to this site of important knowledge, searching for new materialisms within the museum of the frontier.