Ryan Pierce’s most recent exhibition at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Improbable Springs, considers the ways in which we move through the landscape and the marks we leave upon it. Inspired by a six-week hike that Pierce completed from Phoenix, AZ to Silver City, NM in 2018, these are imaginative landscapes that speak to the duality of Pierce’s practice. As a co-founder of Signal Fire, an arts education and residency located in the wilderness, Pierce is an avid outdoorsman, hiker, explorer, climate and justice activist. As an artist, he devotes extensive time in his studio making paintings inspired by the places he has been. The resultant large landscapes paintings are a product of both these ways of being and the viewer is invited to explore  along with the artist.

Pierce describes these landscapes as places of longing: his longing to be out in nature and not in the exile of the studio. They also reflect our desire for the land to heal itself, to return to what it was before our interventions. The paintings suggest but do not dictate a narrative and raise questions about recreation, travel and emergency travel in the American Southwest. Viewers are left to their own conclusions about the politics of climate  migration and the potential for optimism in the face of global climate change.

Over the course of his now 20-year career, Pierce’s style remains representational although with  surreal juxtapositions of man-made objects (both beautiful and abject), plants, and landscapes. The meticulous, detailed manner in which he has painted in the past has opened up to a bold palette and gestural marks. Hot pinks, oranges, purples and blues, almost neon in their intensity, create a sense of superabundance, in nature, in made-made things and in artistic intention. 

The scale of these works is cinematic. (The largest of the paintings measures 72 by 96 inches.) We are close up and fully immersed. Human attempts to constrict nature, barbed wire or fences, are overgrown and outwitted by industrious plants. Flowers dazzle, cacti bloom, water pools and feeds rich growth. Fecundity refuses to be constrained. Similarly, Pierce’s painting alternates between passages of carefully observed detail and swaths of exuberant washes and drips. 

Like the subject of his works, his process cannot be constrained. Their immersive size allows the viewer to travel through these imagined landscapes but facture is evident throughout as well. We can equally imagine ourselves at the artist’s shoulder watching the process of stenciling, mark-making and spray paint dissolving into flashe. Pierce has described himself as a craft painter, one who privileges process for process’ sake. He has also mentioned how his printmaking has influenced his painting, moving from careful rendering to the misregistration of imagery and a strategy of working in layers. In Queens of the Night, a pink spray paint drip contrasts with the tightly rendered cactus in the foreground and the metal fencing beside it. In Cover Crop, the flowers of the title alternate between crisp articulation and painterly smudges.  

Pierce delights in manipulating the boundaries between representation and abstraction. These are spaces we can imaginatively place ourselves – there is a foreground, middle ground and background – but some objects are fully grounded while others seem to float, untethered to their environment. In Pima Cotton, books are embedded in the dirt but a plastic water bottle hovers above the ground, unmoored in space. In other works, a flip flop, a vase, and a broken necklace on a blanket also trouble our sense of spatial location. This, of course, is an apt metaphor for the objects’ appearance in these places. They  remain alien and strange as they were never meant to be there in the first place. 

The detritus is remnants of some unspecified human activity, some perhaps joyous, perhaps fraught with peril. In addition to the improbable springs themselves, the gas can, plastic bags and bottles, shoes and other clothing evidence lives interrupted, referencing the emergency migration from the southern border. Other objects like the books, pith helmet, pitchfork and shovel reference colonial exploration and our attempts to subjugate nature for our own advantage and to plant that unintegrated knowledge where it can do no good. 

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Pierce’s painting practice has always been in close dialogue with his literary influences and his own creative writing. This current body of work is based on one paragraph stories he wrote as part of his MFA program in Creative Writing. But in these works, Pierce invites us to provide our own narrative rather than cleave to ones provided by the artist.  Blankets, candles, and vases in some works suggest picnics and other pleasant outdoor activities while single shoes suggest haste and discomfort. 

Is the radiance, the sheer exuberance of the flora on display a sign of optimism? Hard to say, given the human detritus littering the landscape. But there is certainly optimism in our enjoyment of the present moment and  Pierce’s clear joy in the act of painting.

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Elizabeth Leach Gallery is located at 417 NW 9th Avenue in Portland. It is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:30 am – 5:30 pm. Improbable Springs is on view through June 1st.