Jorge S. Arango reviews Roland Biermann's solo show "Weisses Gold," on view at The Parsonage Gallery, Maine from 8 September until 24 November 2024.
“G. Roland Biermann’s visual vocabulary,” reads the curatorial statement, “often includes industrial materials, which offer a compelling minimalist aesthetic while also signaling ecological distress.” An installation behind a corrugated metal sheet suspended from the ceiling is a cry to action. Behind it, Biermann has piled plastic bottles in plastic bags and tires. It is hardly minimalist, but the installation does obviate the idea of ecological distress. About 800 million tires become waste annually. Their production and use generate heavy metals, plastics and toxic compounds that enter our environment via air, water and ground. Biermann wants us to consider our dependency on rubber tires and all the plastics that are polluting our oceans, atmosphere and soil. Hanging here, too, are a pair of photographs developed on tin, their metallic sheen perhaps implying something precious or referring, through their gold tint, to the King Midas-like greed that impels manufacturers to pollute for profit and gain.
Other photos around the space are more formalist in composition and developed on concrete or paper. They depict weird juxtapositions, as in “snow + concrete,” for example, where little mounds of snow appear incongruously inside a parking lot. What are they doing there? How did they arrive in this place? How might this natural phenomena and the human-built environment relate to, or contradict, each other? The images are enigmatic and odd. They seem to suggest an ever more present condition of our contemporary reality: the impossibility of reconciling or balancing the pristineness of Earth with humankind’s impact upon it.
Learn more --
Environmental visions will beckon you off the beaten path (pressherald.com)
