Anne Roecklein: Scapes

Image: Anne Roecklein, Seaweedscape with Sand Grains, 2016, screen print and collage on paper, 15½ x 26″. Photo: Mandy Johnson.

In Scapes, the places in Anne Roecklein’s works remain elusive. She accomplishes this disorientation by inverting scale and focus in four series of collage-on-paper pieces. The larger Paper Lures and Seaweedscapes bring the microscopic to the fore, whereas Speculative Plans and Firmament explore the vast in postcard-sized compositions.

“A lot of my work is how I process my own anxieties in the world, and I think in our contemporary moment of GPS everything and satellite surveillance and things like that, it’s really almost hard to get lost. Place is so specific,” said Roecklein. “And with all of these, sometimes I’m looking for an escapist impulse, with a building that can’t exist or, in [Firmament], by cutting out the land and just keeping the sky, this becomes an anonymous place.”

Books provide the collage materials for Paper Lures, some of the show’s oldest works. Roecklein cut out egg clusters and fishing lures, among other items, from science textbooks and cookbooks to form the five individual pieces. Paper Lure with Sand Grains (2015, 22 x 30″), for example, depicts a constellation of yellow orbs and ovals surrounding molecular structures on a white background. The focus is similarly tight in Seaweedscapes, though Roecklein adds screen printing to the mix in the three framed collages on paper. A significant portion of the show’s largest piece, Seaweedscape with Pearls (2016, 15 ½ x 57 ½”), uses screen-printed purple to generate a larger world in which collage groupings can interact.

While Speculative Plans mashes buildings in postcards together to convey how familiar parts can generate an impossible whole, the artist’s field of vision expands more clearly in Firmament. The eight works are similar in size to Speculative Plans pieces yet are more ambiguous. They appear mountainous, with solid-colored land meeting an only slightly more detailed sky.

At Outside, a storefront gallery on a small Berkshire hill, gallery co-director Mandy Johnson mounted two sets of four Firmament landscapes on beams in the center of the room. “From certain vantage points,” she said, “these postcards become larger than the Seaweedscapes on the walls just because of their placement in the space.”