REVIEW: Mapping a New Transcendence, A Review of “Kristina Sheufelt: Fallow Season” at the Grand Rapids Art Museum
Installation view of Kristina Sheufelt: Fallow Season at the Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM). Photo courtesy of GRAM.
REVIEW
Mapping a New Transcendence
A Review of Kristina Sheufelt: Fallow Season
The Grand Rapids Art Museum
101 Monroe Center St NW
Grand Rapids, MI 49503
February 1 – May 4, 2025
By Kristie Kahns
Rhythms beyond conventional time are what govern nature: cycles of tumult and rest, fertility and decay. Seasons become one way of measuring this change and invoking these rhythms. And seasons are the most salient reminders that we, of the human world, are intimately bound to nature’s rhythms––but only if we can listen and see and feel them. In Fallow Season, a wide-ranging exhibition of works exploring the affective force of the natural world, Detroit-based artist and environmentalist Kristina Sheufelt proposes inventive methods for restoring our relationship to the earth and its cadences.
Situated in the first floor galleries of the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Fallow Season is the latest exhibition in the Museum’s Michigan Artist Series. This emphasis on featuring regional talent and uplifting local stories is one of the most appealing aspects of GRAM, positioning itself as an approachable space for artists and audiences alike. For Sheufelt, whose interdisciplinary practice is rooted in ecopsychology, cybernetics, and the ecologies of Michigan and the Great Lakes, the museum space itself might be the challenge. How can artwork that is dependent on the transcendent sensory experiences of nature convey its message in a pristine gallery space? The strategies that Sheufelt devises are imaginative and surprising: from photography made on a remote archipelago and videos made under a microscope, to data-informed sculptures and haunting poetry.
Fittingly, Fallow Season opened on Imbolc, the halfway point between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, with the exhibition continuing as we trod our way into spring. The rhythms of this season are undeniable, even for city dwellers: buds appear on the trees, birdsongs return to the morning hours, longer days invite us outdoors even if the temperature is still brisk. Our rhythms, too, are changing as we pass the threshold into spring, and this is Sheufelt’s imperative: to find synchronicity, to deeply observe, to “become a transparent eye-ball,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson explained, and “let the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.”1
Perhaps you can recall an awestruck moment in nature, as the Transcendentalists exalted; maybe a hike in the woods, or a majestic view of the mountains, or a flock of birds swooping through the sky overhead. But in those moments, have you thought to record the pattern of your brainwaves or the rhythm of your heartbeat? The approach of ecopsychology emphasizes that these revelatory moments in nature provoke a biological response and nurture an emotional connection to the environment. Sheufelt incorporates technology and performance into her practice to record these physiological responses, translating the data and embodied experience into new aesthetic forms.
Installation view of A Wind From NoPlace by Kristina Sheufelt at the Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM). Photo courtesy of GRAM.
As the centerpiece of the exhibition, the kinetic sculpture and video A Wind From NoPlace epitomizes her rendering process. In the video, we see Sheufelt meditatively sitting in a field of tall reed grass, wearing a wired cap to record electrical activity of her brain. In the center of the gallery space, rows of the same reed grasses are installed on motorized supports, programmed to interpolate the EEG data into swaying rhythms. On the day I visited, the sculpture was not in motion, but nevertheless I was moved to consider the inner topography that longs to find harmonious rhythms in nature.
By placing herself in this dynamic circuit of affective, physiological input and aesthetic output, Sheufelt affirms an attestation of the visual theorist Susan Buck-Morss. The aesthetic is a fundamentally cognitive experience, she argues, prompted by an animalistic, bodily sense of reality.2 Trusting these sensory inputs as innate knowledge becomes the charge for an artist like Sheufelt. By revealing the memories and mysteries of the other-than-human world, she encourages critical perception through new forms of transcendence.
Installation view of Waveform by Kristina Sheufelt at the Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM). Photo courtesy of GRAM.
She succeeds in this endeavor in Waveform, a suspended sculpture of shimmering aluminum tiles meant to conjure the beauty and power of the Great Lakes. This mesmerizing airborne shape, like a sunlight wave heading ashore, transported me to the edge of Lake Superior last summer during my first trip to the Upper Peninsula. The immensity of this freshwater sea as visceral experience was transformative, deepening my appreciation for living in close proximity to Lake Michigan.
The use of technology to reinvigorate a relationship which has been severed by the conveniences of modernity is a paradoxical––if not antithetical––methodology. The results are mixed. The 3-D printed sculptures of Drift I and Drift II, drawn from complex sensory inputs of Sheufelt’s bodily experience in Lake Michigan, appear as fossils, monumentalized within their oversized vitrines. But ultimately, these forms fall short of a revelatory translation as they appear too synthetic, too plastic. The sculptural clay forms of Six Attempts to Remember Tinker Creek are far more effective; by incorporating soil samples collected from the Appalachian Trail, these miniature topographic models––sized like snapshot photographs––suggest the archive of memories that the land holds.
I am skeptical of the role of technology in reexamining our relationship to nature because the other influences in Sheufelt’s practice are so evident: the wisdom of Braiding Sweetgrass; the vivid language of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; the vitality and poetics of Rebecca Solnit; the urgency of Rachel Carson. Sheufelt’s work, in my view, is steeped in these writings and the lineage of Transcendentalist thinkers. Emerson himself would be captivated by the dreamlike video Komorebi, which displays Sheufelt’s keen attunement to nature’s optics and light as “the first of painters.”3 Yet, the use of technologies––like Google Earth satellite imagery or spectrogram software––to elicit the memories of land or sea is a precarious terrain for an artist concerned with ecological vigor. Such systems are not exempt from environmental tolls and degradation, but their presumably dematerialized status tends to obscure the ongoing relationship between our digital world and resource extraction.4
The evocative title of the exhibition summons images of distressed soil and the promise of verdant fields; to lie fallow is to submit oneself to the need for restoration. In Sheufelt’s quiet call to action, it is not the land, but it is us who need to surrender to this season of latent power. In doing so, we may awaken our senses to the stories that the earth holds and find a new connection to the ecological rhythms that sustain us.
FOOTNOTES
1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Penguin Books - Great Ideas (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 8.
2 Grant H. Kester, “Aesthetics after the End of Art: An Interview with Susan Buck-Morss,” Art Journal 56, no. 1 (March 1, 1997): 38–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.1997.10791799.
3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Penguin Books - Great Ideas (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 13.
4 For more on this relationship between the extraction of rare earth minerals and visual imaging technologies, see Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024).
Kristie Kahns works in the photographic field as an educator, image-maker, writer, and independent researcher, based in Chicago. She received an MA in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a BA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago.
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