It feels strange to see ice and snow in the heat of August. Dan Torop’s photographs of the Lynden Sculpture Garden make it stranger still, as the night wraps around bare black tree branches shifting into electric blue, decorated by blushing crabapple berries that hang resolutely like unwilling decorations. In Falls, January 23, 2014, a vaporous white stream spills between neatly cut square rocks. Its translucence takes the character of both frozen water and ghostly steam. Even Torop’s pictures of the height of summer are filled with visual mysteries. But that is his aim.
As artist-in-residence, he lived at the Lynden for various periods between July 2013 and 2014. The exhibition, “Dan Torop: Frozen Period,” is a body of work culminating from this experience. In the spirit of exploration, he wandered among the estate’s 40 acres to get into the depths of nature’s transformation. The process entailed looking past the formal identity of a place that is home to modernist masters like Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore and fixate upon the land that lies beneath.
Torop’s project is fundamentally inspired by two pioneering explorers. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the Corps of Discovery Expedition through what would become the western United States. Lewis’s journal entry of Friday, June 14, 1805, is included in the exhibition catalogue as particularly instructive. He describes waterfalls, distinguished as “pleasingly beautiful,” and “sublimely grand.” This is along with fending off a bear attack, an encounter with some sort of wildcat and scaring off some potentially rampaging buffalo. All in a day’s work.
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Lewis documented that day in his diary, and being an artist of modern means, Torop uses the photographic image to draw us into his engagement with a place that is temporary and mutable. As a philosophy, it is instructive. Does familiarity breed contempt? Are we too busy speeding through daily life to absorb the discreet patter of nature as it cycles through yearly passages? There is a human predilection for novelty, for something new to always catch our eye. We seek it out, but Torop shows it is always nearby.
Through Sept. 20 at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, 2145 W. Brown Deer Road.
