Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks
Under the watchful guard of the vintage figureheads circling the room, the Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks exhibition is exquisitely matched to the founding of the Peabody Essex Museum. Established in 1799 as the East India Marine Society, the nascent museum's first collections were "curiosities" brought home by the brave crews who navigated uncharted, worldwide oceanic routes. This was an era when anyone who went to sea also faced the fates of weather and the tenuous technology of those times. Many were lost to un-witnessed, tumultuous calamities. Their memories became narratives in the lore of the ocean's power.
Artist Alexis Rockman enters these mysteries of history, and boldly dares to paint what was never seen. With a touch of Salvador Dali and Delacroix, and even more Gustave Courbet, his paintings capture high drama at sea, often derived from historical tragedies that disappeared into the immense swallow of the ocean.
Vessels afire before capsizing, scientific specimens dispersed at sea, horses abandoned, whale calves born, polar bears claiming the only remaining remnant of two ships lost in the North Pole. Works derived from known catastrophes provide the viewer with both narrative and an imagined visual record of an event that brought terror to the participants, and sometimes disruption to the habitat. Rockman's paintings are arresting, impossible to take lightly, and impossible to forget.
If a power of art is to give imagination to that which was not witnessed, the Rockman paintings color a void. An intense, beguiling exhibition, it is perfectly staged in the grandest gallery north of Boston, the East India Marine Hall at Peabody Essex Museum.
Curated by Andrea Grover of Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY, the exhibition is the first in PEM’s new Climate + Environment Initiative.
Through May 31, 2021 — East India Marine Hall, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem
Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks
For more on Rockman's unique vision on the tension between nature and civilization: 2011 Talk at Smithsonian American Art Museum, given for his exhibition, Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow.
Alexis Rockman provides tour of exhibition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYDoEbAXtVw
