Spangler's Cold Comfort at the Prairie

Phil Spangler’s Cold Comfort (2010) is as an ambitious exhibition. Presenting a collection of sculpture that encompasses the living to the kinetic, it addresses the tense relationship between man and the natural environment. This is conceptual territory that can easily diverge into the cliché; fortunately Spangler spares his audience the heavy-handed moralizing (he doesn’t even provide an artist’s statement) and allows the work to speak in its place.

An assortment of six sculptures, Cold Comfort is a study in both texture and contrast. The title piece, a cast bronze deer skull partially enveloped by Borax crystals, is at first glance redolent of Damien Hirst’s vulgar For the Love of God (2007). Spangler’s Cold Comfort, by contrast, is a tasteful, nuanced rumination on death and rebirth.

Three hung felt pieces entitled Yellow, White and Black, (2010) also smothered in Borax crystals, function in much the same way. The subtlety in these works though comes less from their conceptual ramifications than from their sly insinuation of deep space receding back from a dense, surface-reaffirming substance.

Everything I Thought I Knew, the most substantial and important of the works on display, is nothing less than an indictment of human misappropriation of the natural world. A kinetic sculpture that parades the object realism of a desiccated, desertified landscape before you, Everything I Thought I Knew (2010) requires the viewer to become participant. As the hand crank activates the sculpture, the slow, methodical churning of the mechanism dismembers the landscape before your eyes. That you as the operator are directly responsible for this destruction is immediately clear, what is less clear, and more compelling, is that on the other end of the sculpture you too are responsible for its recreation.

The structure is complex and formally alluring, but the manufacture seems out of place. The clean beams and fresh-from-the-hardware-store aesthetic are not in keeping with the roughly hewn quality we often associate with the natural environment.

Of all the works in Cold Comfort only Right Back Where We Started From (2010) fails to truly satisfy. This can be attributed to the fact that the technical requirements for keeping grass alive indoors must ultimately overwhelm the formal aspects of the sculpture. Though not without its own appeal, its interest exists primarily as novelty rather than as a work of art proper.

Instead of brow beating the viewer with messages of impending doom (as many shows on Earth themes do), Phil Spangler has chosen to construct a subtle narrative that suggests environmental destruction and renewal might be more closely bound than we often think. Spangler’s creations impart to us the notion that all things dead are reborn in new ways, and that no matter what the natural world will go on; perhaps just without us. Cold Comfort indeed.
- Alan Pocaro

Phil Spangler. 'Cold Comfort' at Prairie, 4035 Hamilton Avenue in Northside, Cincinnati, OH. Tel: 513.557.3819. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday 10-6 and Saturday 10-4. Through May 8, 2010.
Photo above: Spangler, Phil. Cold Comfort (2010). Bronze, borax. Photo courtesy of Prairie.
below: Spangler, Phil. Everything I Thought I Knew (2010). Mixed Media. Photo courtesy of Prairie.