The Artists of the Film MANA

di Shana Nys Dambrot

“Surfing’s one of the few sports that you look ahead to see what’s behind.” — Laird Hamilton

It’s pronounced “MAH-nah” — an untranslatable Polynesian logism that refers to an elusive but ubiquitous sense of awe-filled connectedness to the patterns and powers of natural forces — especially the ocean. The documentary film MANA, directed by photographer Eric Minh Swenson, highlights the work of ten visual artists whose lives and studio practices are defined by the presence of mana in their minds and their materials, examining their individual relationships to the ocean as an allegory for creative momentum and as a devotional lifestyle.

Psychologically speaking, a Jungian-style analysis of water as a representative for the state of the subconscious mind makes a lot of sense. You dream of a roiling ocean, say, or a placid lake, an icy woodland brook, a frozen waterfall, a port city, a dry riverbed — and an emotional interpretation is fairly straightforward as a metaphor for mood. And surfing as a metaphor for riding the creative wave is just as straightforward, as well as the context for a deep, nuanced connection to the forces and rhythms of the natural world. The artists in the film speak insightfully about the operations of intuition, focus, and clarity in a personal sense — and equally passionately about the magic of surface qualities, scale, the role of color, the play of light, luminosity, transparency, undulation, and reflection in an artistic sense.

Most of their work exists within the boundaries of traditional genres like painting, sculpture, and photography — within which arenas each of them define their own territory, articulating an eclectic array of stylistic, narrative, and material-driven work along the abstract/symbolist/conceptual continuum. They explore the topic at hand through as many stylistic modes as there are artists — more, in fact, as several artists exhibit work in more than one medium, or inherently incorporate multiples mediums into both installations and singular works.

Ned Evans is an accomplished abstract painter who also makes refined dimensional resin works for the wall, demonstrating the power of light and saturated, diffuse color in two and three dimensions. While the radiant, gradient orange of the painting invokes the honey-drip of the setting sun despite its geometrical arrangement, the cluster of smaller cast resin drops and puddles come closer to being water than to depicting it. Similarly, Alex Weinstein’s abstract paintings are both more gestural and expressionistic than Evans’ but no less evocative of the low-hanging sun. Weinstein’s linear arrangement of concrete cubes topped with layers of wave-motion patterns like frozen riptides, blending hard surfaces with soft algorithms in a way that, once again, more embodies than depicts the waters it represents.

Casper Brindle makes paintings whose shimmering horizon-line vistas seem to change their surface qualities with the fluctuations of ambient light and viewers’ own movements — sometimes literally changing color due to his use of dichroic pigment. Though aesthetically quite different, this too is an example of evocation in conjunction with depiction with regard to the sea. His sculptural installation (a retro school chair on a slightly raised, highly reflective dias, the whole awash in a ceiling-mounted projection of cosmic, nebulous, sparkling light) is both captivating and witty, and refers to time spent staring out the window, dreaming of the surfing to come.

Evocative quasi-documentarian photographs by Ken Pagliaro portray surfers doing their various surfer things alone and together — paddling out en masse as a memorial gesture, ebulliently riding their chosen crests, contemplating the stunning natural perspectives only available out on the water. They are eccentric, experiential, archetypal, and personal. Restrained, conceptual oceanic topographies are also Steve Fuchs’ happy place — except rendered in milled wood as cartographic patterns that express the fractal quality of ocean water as bas relief drawing made with precision and patience.

There is a decided prevalence of specific materials which tether the group to identifiable eras in Los Angeles history and art history — stencil, collage, spray paint, digitalism, resin, foam, fiberglass, automotive paint, surf wax, light & space, finish fetish. Notable is Eric Johnson whose undulating, glimmering, glass-like, watery resin works function simultaneously as abstract paintings and natural sciences-style rendering of wave forms, not unlike Weinstein’s sculptural blocks. Johnson achieves both solidity (mass) and luminosity (refraction), and by mounting them on the wall, the cast shadows discover their own part to play in the sculptural experience of the work. Alex Couwenberg makes paintings that also have a slightly sculptural aspect to them — in that the multiple layers of textured pigment used to construct his engineered supernovas are built up off the surface. Their interplay of color, mark-making, and a certain surface physicality not usually associated with the kind of hard-edge abstraction he practices each have a role to play in deploying his explosive rich tertiary palette.

Painters Ben Brough and David Lloyd each employ certain kinds of familiar imagery, cultivating versions of the laid-back surrealism fostered by the surf-centric topsy-turvy visual culture in Southern California. Across Brough’s rough and tumble bleached color fields are scattered emblems of the people and their habits in a deceptively simple style that seems sparse but contains multitudes. Lloyd creates a multidextrous jumble that through contemplation resolves its unique deployment of trompe l’oeil, geometric hard-edge, and splash-bangs into a proper picture. Engaging dealings unfold within this overall sensibility of the time and place — beyond fine art, embracing the attendant cultures of music, film, fashion, youth, and general sun-worship.

Craig “Skibs” Barker imagines an elaborate installation so unique, quirky, eclectic, and exuberant that it threatens to steal the spotlight, but instead contextualizes the whole in a veritable chapel to nostalgia, pop art, and pretty girls. Amid a sprawl of vintage mannequins and knick-knacks, old TV sets play expertly collaged video clips of the OG surfing generation at the height of its dope-friendly good life. Amid an orderly tumult of high-heel shoes, hand-painted signs, copies of Vargas drawings made by the artist’s grandfather, and ads for hosiery only Don Draper could love, one finds large and small paintings in their proper context of vintage, salt-taffy sex appeal. As a group, the artists of MANA prove that even amid a proliferation of styles and intentions, the connection they have to the ocean is the current that connects them to their art and to one another.

A version of this essay appeared in Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art in August 2014.