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Oct 29, 2024

There’s Something Toxic About Megan Bickel’s Landscapes

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LEXINGTON, Kentucky — In between receiving her MFA and becoming an assistant professor of painting at the University of Louisville, Megan Bickel took an unusual detour for a career artist, earning an MA in Digital Studies in Language, Culture and History at the University of Chicago.

I share this information because I think knowing Bickel’s twin pursuits makes her work more readable, if not fully knowable. Knowledge, visual perception, and the disruption of both by new technologies are at the heart of the artist’s current exhibition, Orgonon, at Institute 193. Together, her 12 recent paintings — all firmly ensconced in both the digital and the tactile — convey a vibrant and disquieting sense of what it feels like to be alive right now: to witness a flourishing of creativity amid war and environmental destruction and to sense an uneasiness with artificial intelligence even as we’ve come to depend on it in our daily lives and interactions.

Bickel begins the works by digitally collaging her own photography, often selecting textural imagery, such as cloudscapes, grass, and trees, or sequined, mesh, and holographic fabrics. She reproduces the collages on canvas with an inkjet printer before mounting them on hardboard; she then intervenes with oil and acrylic paints, sometimes in thick globs and other times with an almost translucent lightness. Additional materials, such as hydraulic cement or holographic cellophane, amplify the work’s physicality or further confound the viewer’s visual perception.

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In the show’s titular work, a rough-edged triangle sits askew in a bed of tall green grasses. The digital image of a clouded sky fills the triangle, transforming it into a portal to another dimension, while a pixelated camouflage pattern at the bottom edge suggests an encroaching military presence — or, perhaps, the potential for digital images to become corrupted into unreadable grids of color.

I had assumed Bickel had created the illusion using Photoshop, but the triangular area is actually a piece of reflective fabric that the artist had placed in the grass and then photographed. The clouds were not digital manipulations at all, but rather the sky reflected in the fabric. (The camouflage pattern appeared on the fabric’s reverse.) That I was so ready to accept the image as a “fake” felt unsettling to me.

Bickel’s painterly interventions in “Orgonon” are minimal — a line of green tracing a long blade of grass, some curves around the perimeter. But she also paints on the sides of the panel, which indicates a desire to draw the viewer back into the material realm, to remind us that this is, indeed, a physical object.

A much bolder application of paint features in “I write because I cannot paint” (2024), with its pronounced stripes of dark brown, tan, and green, and thick ribbons of Pepto Bismol pink dancing across a pastoral inkjet background. Small sections of yellow appear at first to be paint, but could also be fabric placed in the field. The work, with its playful abstractions floating across a photographed landscape, conjures notions of augmented reality.

Other works, however, resist such easy associations. “Once I saw a war comic and the guns went budda budda budda and wham. My rifle was actually more like krang” (2024) gently evokes the sea through sequined fabric that shimmers like the scales of a fish, as well as hundreds of small, iridescent pink brushstrokes that seem to move like a school in the ocean, and graceful arcs of deep green paint. But a smooth golden form and daubs of electric pink paint around the edges of the canvas prevent the work from becoming a mere oceanscape. Is the golden rock talisman or trash? Does the shocking pink represent toxic slime?

Similarly, in “Fishbrain, what do you think about, when your kitchen’s on fire” (2024), muted sequins glimmer inside an area that’s been masked off to resemble a Zen-like stack of rocks. Peaceful, except that after enough time the aqueous layer of micaceous iron oxide starts to recall an oil spill slowly coating the ocean life with its slick, malevolent sheen.

According to the gallery statement, Bickel’s research “assesses how Google Vision API […] would impact the fate of climate reporting due to current labeling production design.” If a computer doesn’t recognize that an image represents an effect of climate change, then is it even happening? What if our perception becomes so distorted that we no longer see the extent to which a digital hegemony is shaping our physical world? While Bickel’s research may attempt to answer the first question, her art responds to the second with a mesmerizing and uneasy open-endedness.

Megan Bickel: Orgonon continues at Institute 193 (193 North Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky) through July 27. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

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Natalie Weis is a writer and art critic based in Louisville, Kentucky. Her interests include emerging artists working on the periphery—both geographically and in their chosen mediums. Her writing has... More by Natalie Weis