The Brooklyn Rail

As I left Justin Cloud’s current exhibition at Jack Barett, Knightwatch, I found myself thinking of Michael Heizer’s Negative Megalith #5 (1998). There is something to Cloud’s reliefs that evoked the dark force of that work, its atmosphere of impending danger. Cloud’s botanical forms, realized through the technique of repoussé, turn ornamentation into a kind of protective structure. But this necessarily implies threat. Preserved in aluminum, Cloud’s entangled thorns and blooms harbor within the surface a vocabulary of dread. Embedded within the reflective surface of each work is a darkness hooked on its lure—a shadowed language of nature, death, and mimicry bound up in the survival techniques of both predator and prey.

Knightwatch’s chrome ecology generates an uneasy stillness, perhaps parallel to the moment the forest grows quiet before something strikes out from the darkness. The exhibition is all tendrils, pointed barbs, and camouflage. Forms emerge and coil into gestalts without a snapping twig; toe to heel, treading light but steady. The idyll of Cloud’s world is fixed, compressed, and sheathed. Snares and spikes form armored botanicals that dance in shadows and pareidolic forms. What expands could be the calligraphy adorning the cover of a dark heavy metal album or the crazing of Damascus steel. Tender things have grown hard to protect their way of life. In Water Dance (2024) the petals unwind, spinning into human designs, like motorcycle components or brass knuckles. Sus (2024) has a Sacred Heart burning within its hive, a glowing sacrament held within the burl or petal. Surrounding this symbol of infinite love are embedded gems. Placed while the surface is glowing red hot, they are arranged like the inhuman eyes seen in early Google DeepDream images—always looking out from within the veil of the algorithm. We are implicated in our looking in other ways as well. In Clytie (2024), the seedbeds of Cloud’s sunflowers are polished, not to the sheen of a gazing ball, but more like the dappled refraction of a twisted bumper. You can almost see yourself in the flower, but not quite.

Cloud’s studio practice is somewhere between the forge and the factory. His engineering background at Ford and his family history of factory work gets inevitably pulled into the way his work is framed. It is physically demanding work. He implicates himself in the slow-moving climate disaster of human engineering and progress, as his work carries the anxiety about the time that carbon emissions are robbing us of. The choice of aluminum for this series further betrays a larger systemic interrogation of the exchange-value abstractions posed by post-industrial society. Even five years ago, aluminum could have been employed as a critique of the commodity’s translation of casual, base material into luxury transcendence. As aluminum prices soar due to its mass acquisition by tech manufacturers, the meaning of the reflection on its surface drifts, even as we perceive it. Now the conveyor belt moves a bit slower, producing less for higher costs, all while exchanging physical certainty for virtual promise. Cloud’s factory line is a reconciliation through material, a movement of choices that strives to see something retrievable in the scrap heap of global capital’s ethic of waste and dispossession.

The presence of time in the work is productively ambivalent. Are these objects made now or are they relics of a future that only knows nature through images? If they exist and operate now, they are about a virtual experience of nature. The gems and geodes signal the material presence of terra, cynically manifesting it as a form of alienation rather than a poetic parallel.

Ultimately, Cloud’s work echoes a funeral—this is what made me think of Heizer’s Negative. Cloud’s work is an end of something, but it’s the end of something that is yet to come. It exists on the other side of the grim realities posed by Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault, while Heiser’s Negative exists before it. Where Heizer displays a boulder as a way of reminding us that culture cannot understand the reality of nature, Cloud aims to vex the way we encounter nature in the first place, shielding it from our need to intervene. Rather than remind us of the artificiality of the white cube, Cloud’s work feels like an acknowledgment that the world is now more gallery than ecosystem: the abstraction of materials and systems have made even our most embodied experiences virtual. Cloud’s subject is the erasure of the future by climate change and our very inability to access the reality that Heizer interrogated in 1998. For Cloud, nature is already a reliquary, a fossil of what has been left. Or maybe it is a crater—a crater that grows in us. His repoussé is a process of indexing everything that is slipping beyond us, hammered out with the heartbreaking urgency of the knowledge that it is all receding. By evoking the frieze, Cloud’s works summon forth an imagined tomb not yet built, the tomb of a garden reified in material durable enough to outlast the life it depicts.