Desert Transcendentalist: on the work of Agnes Pelton
The Whitney hosted a retrospective of the artist Agnes Pelton in the spring and summer of 2020. This is one of those rare shows, that, had I known about it, I would have traveled immediately, that afternoon, across town to go see it. At the time however I was either going crazy alone in my apartment, or marching in the streets and, as with the rest of the world, I did not have the wherewithal to even begin to think about going to a museum.
As such, I must be a troglodyte because I have only just encountered her work for the first time this last week. One of her paintings features on the cover of a recent book on Shamanism I am writing about. Intrigued by this book cover, I searched her work on the net and, images of her paintings populating my visual field, I had one of those most rare internet moments of beatitude and surprise; reader, I gasped.
Feeling like an vision that has arrived from the future, its origins yet lie in a past indifferent to her work. Agnes Pelton (1881-1961) is one of those untimely artists who, neglected in her own life, arrives 75 years after the fact with all of the powers of revelation. She revelates me at least. This work turns outward landscapes into inward terrain. Light beams from the paintings. There is a peculiar whimsy here, as if these were the landscapes of a bugs bunny cartoon set in the fields of Elysium. Weirdly enough, these paintings resemble aspects of Hilma af Klint’s own visionary work but, due to af Klint’s self-imposed embargo, Agnes Pelton could not have known of her. So the paintings also resonate with a trans-planetary synchronicity, as if each artist were surfing on the winds of a shared alien world.
