A Stirring Story of the American West from Lynette K. Kenderson by Genie Davis
Lynette K. Henderson’s deeply moving multimedia exhibition Stories From The American West: Death and Life At The Edge Of The Great Basin captures life in the Great Basin, a region many never visit. This western region stretches some 190,000-square-miles throughout Nevada and half of Utah, as well as into areas of California, Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming. Speaking personally, I have experienced the vast and empty wonder of a small corner of it in Nevada near Great Basin National Park, making this stunning exhibition even more resonant.
Bordered by the Sierra Nevada to the west, the Wasatch Mountains to the east, the region is its own world of flora and fauna, one which Henderson lived within during an art residency last spring at Playa Summer Lake in the Oregon Outback at the western edge of the Great Basin.
She was inspired to produce this exceptional body of work with her keen eye seemingly focused on every detail of this remote high desert region with its vast, uninhabited – at least by humans – plains. Awash in the smell of sagebrush and the dust of arid basins, the geometric precision of the fault-block mountains like Abert Rim, are ghostly in their emptiness. But Henderson saw these mountains, these plains as something far different than empty. She saw them as the home to dramatically pristine plant and animal life. At least until you look more closely, as Henderson has, to view the plant and animal life
Contained by surrounding mountains, Summer Lake itself serves as a vital habitat for migratory birds, which form one element of the artist’s remarkable interpretation of the region and its living creatures.
The exhibition is a wide-ranging one, featuring a potent mix of her beautifully alive animal and landscape paintings, drawings, and totems, as well as her photography, a video, and a soundscape which recreates the environment for viewers quiet enough to listen to the sounds of wind and wild bird calls.
Completing the gallery space are panels with maps and information about deforestation, climate change, human activity and development, and the effects of natural disasters. The informative material, photographs, and video installation comprise one end of the gallery; around it in a U-like display are Henderson’s paintings, collage and ink and acrylic drawings, and sculptural totems.
Her personal image-journal of photographs takes us as viewers with her as she finds her subjects. The video, equipped with headphones, tbrings to life the call of a bird, the rush of the wind, the calming moments of pristine silence broken by the humming existence of this land. Like the audio soundscape, the video serves as a soft undercurrent of memory as viewers explore the gallery just as Henderson herself explored the region she depicts.
The artist also offers small maps and written background about humans in the Great Basin, and the tuff ring of lava and water that is Fort Rock, Oregon, as well as a map and description of the Paisley Caves that inspired one body of Henderson’s work here.
This is a powerful and poetic exhibition, one that transports the viewer to a different, more raw, wild, and wonderful environment. The artist’s work is both visceral and seductive, luring the viewer into a private yet vast new space, one that reflects both her personal experience and the universal allure of nature and the call of wild creatures to a wild spirit.
The desolate region is far from desolate in Henderson’s work. Rather, it is intimately alive through the artist’s images, each almost achingly invoking a sense of both longing and belonging in this distant place. Her vividly realistic images of crows, pigeons, robins, coyotes, and feathers outside the mouth of a cave, are each sublimely rendered, and create a sense of immediacy for and with her viewers.
The audio landscape gently leads each visitor deep into the exhibition, augmenting the sense of sacredness that permeates both the artist’s experience at her residency and a viewer’s experience in seeing her work.
Some images are monochrome, or close to it, such as the ink and acrylic “Decomposing Tree with Ravens.” The muted tones of black, brown, white, and beige create a dream-like experience of and appreciation for the desert and plains, as the artist explores the delicate nuance of decaying wood, the life it still sustains, and its loss.
In a smaller acrylic and ink on paper with collage, “Crow with Leaves,” the bird is a sentinel, a watcher, turned in profile, his eye is bright and ready, scanning the environment for food, for prey, for predator.
Placed in the corners of the gallery are the totems that artist shaped, conjoining wood with a wrap of dried grass and adding small plastic figures of regionally appropriate animals such as an antelope, a bear, or a red deer to this natural material.
Henderson’s glorious, large scale, full color acrylic-on-canvas works are as always a standout. “Sunrise with Coyote and Meadowlark” dazzles with a backdrop of peach and lemon colored sky, against which a meadowlark sings a greeting to the morning from the branches of a tree, while a coyote walks past at its base as if going home after a long night. While the bird jubilantly greets the day, the coyote faces in the other direction, perhaps walking toward the safety of his den.
Her poignant canvas painting “Two Calves” reveals two deceased young cattle discarded in the wilderness, perhaps killed elsewhere and dumped. Life and death coincide here. They are intense and startling opposites each rooted in a sense of belonging to this place, and inextricably linked, just as life and death is within all of us. The truth of life’s tenuous nature is simply more clearly seen in the Great Basin.
Henderson’s work here is wide ranging and encompassing, succeeding in presenting both the minutia and the long view of the region. There are highly textured paintings of a burnt forest so carefully created that one could almost breathe the scent of charred wood, touch the scarred and ashy remains of the trees, absorb the sense of tender loss experienced by a red-tailed hawk perched on the now-fragile branches.
Paisley Cave drew the artist to create multiple acrylic-on-canvas images. She paints its evocative rocks and mysterious craigs and openings; or she has juxtaposed perfectly rendered feathers belonging to a raven and a crow, a Cooper’s hawk, or a red-tailed hawk, in this place of sanctuary. She also paints this location with a pigeon far from an urban home in one work, and a bright red-chested robin hopping securely toward the cave’s entrance in another.
As curated by Kristine Schomaker, Henderson’s work is a perfect sensory experience, from vivid paintings to simpler ink and acrylic renderings, and photographic images, too. The artist’s immersion becomes that of the viewers. We see the landscape observed in a variety of mediums, from photographs to carefully witnessed and painted still-so-perfect feathers, marking the migratory passages of birds.
Henderson’s work gives us a fully absorbed and reimagined landscape of land, sky, living creatures, and those that have passed away. It is glorious to share her journey.
The exhibition concludes 3/27 at LAAA Gallery 825 at 825 N. La Cienega in West Hollywood.
- Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis
