By Tyler Stallings
At SCAPE, Earth’s Rhythms brings together four artists whose works pulse with the energy of movement, structure, and transformation. The exhibition is anchored by Nancy Mooslin and Carol Saindon, two artists whose shared fascination with waves—both aquatic and sonic—manifests in vibrant, layered compositions that challenge perception. Their works fragment, reassemble, and reimagine water and sound, creating a visual language that is both scientific and poetic. Gail Roberts and Jacques Garnier extend this dialogue, offering contrasting yet complementary explorations of natural rhythms.
Nancy Mooslin: Painting the Pulse of Sound and Water
Nancy Mooslin’s work captures the unseen harmonies between music and the physical world, translating sound structures into luminous color. Riversong 12 Tone Concerto for Orchestra (oil, graphite, and colored pencil on canvas, 60 x 96 in) embodies the intricate logic of musical composition through a symphony of hues and precise mark-making. The twelve-tone system, typically a foundation of avant-garde music, unfolds in this piece through a meticulously orchestrated arrangement of color shifts, each hue resonating with the tonal frequencies of an octave. The result is a canvas that vibrates with unseen sound, turning abstract theory into something intensely visceral.
Mooslin’s Seine River HVB Gregorian Chant series, rendered in archival pigment prints with gouache overlays, weaves together the fluidity of water and the solemn resonance of ancient chant. The flowing currents of the Seine become visual echoes of sustained tones, their undulating forms overlaid with painterly gestures that recall the rhythmic notation of medieval manuscripts. Each work captures a fleeting moment in water’s movement, much as a Gregorian chant captures breath and time in song. The layering of marks heightens the interplay between permanence and impermanence, evoking the way music, once played, lingers only in memory.
Carol Saindon: The Ocean’s Energy, Refracted and Reordered
Carol Saindon’s work is born from decades of observing the Pacific Ocean’s endless churn, its ceaseless energy a source of both inspiration and investigation. She doesn’t merely document the sea’s motion—she deconstructs it, reconstructs it, and reframes it, revealing underlying patterns that connect the micro and macro forces shaping our world.
In Breaking Point #4 (photomontage on rag paper, 40 x 26 in), the ocean’s turbulence is shattered and reassembled into a mesmerizing grid, a push-pull between natural chaos and imposed order. The breaking waves, frozen mid-motion, become fractured moments of energy, their force restrained but never entirely contained. This visual dissection mirrors the larger forces at play in the cosmos, where vast celestial movements echo the same push and pull seen in Earth’s tides.
Saindon’s Sea Study series offers an intimate counterpoint, focusing on the ephemeral textures of water’s surface. Sea Study #30 (22.5 x 18 in) is particularly striking in its ability to capture both stillness and movement simultaneously. The image, abstract yet undeniably liquid, pulses with kinetic energy, reinforcing Saindon’s fascination with the tension between surface and depth, perception and reality.
Gail Roberts: Nature’s Order, Reimagined
Gail Roberts introduces a different kind of fragmentation—one rooted in the botanical world. Her paintings take the organic and impose structure, aligning with the mathematical and observational rigor found in Mooslin’s and Saindon’s works. Wing It (oil and acrylic on canvas, 56 x 56 in) presents a meticulously arranged grid, each square depicting a fragment of a flower, collectively forming a fantastical hybrid bloom. This controlled arrangement speaks to the artificial yet deeply interconnected ecosystems we cultivate in gardens, where plants from disparate continents thrive in a single space.
Roberts’ work resonates compositionally with Saindon’s photomontages—the structured division of imagery creating a sense of order within complexity. Her color choices, informed by extensive research into botanical origins, subtly align with Mooslin’s own investigations into color theory. Both artists explore systems—whether natural or constructed—that reveal an underlying connectivity, a hidden rhythm within seeming randomness.
Jacques Garnier: The Stillness Within Movement
Jacques Garnier brings a meditative quietude to Earth’s Rhythms, his photography offering a counterbalance to the layered dynamism of Mooslin, Saindon, and Roberts. His Estero series, developed during an artist residency in Inverness, captures the stillness of tidal shifts, the water’s surface an ever-changing mirror reflecting the passage of time.
In 8-37 (photograph, 20 x 20 in), Garnier distills his subject to its essence, eliminating distractions to focus on the subtleties of light, form, and negative space. The result is an image that invites contemplation, drawing the viewer into a state of quiet immersion. His work resonates with Mooslin’s distillation of sound into visual form and Saindon’s reframing of oceanic motion, reinforcing the exhibition’s broader exploration of rhythm—whether seen, heard, or felt.
Earth’s Rhythms unfolds as a dynamic conversation between movement and structure, fluidity and fragmentation. Mooslin translates the ephemeral nature of sound into color and form, while Saindon dissects the ocean’s turbulence, revealing its hidden geometries. Roberts extends this inquiry into the botanical world, her grids bridging the natural and the cultivated, and Garnier distills motion into meditative stillness. Together, these artists create a resonant field of inquiry, one that transforms our perception of rhythm—both in art and in the world around us.
Earth’s Rhythms, February 22 – March 22, 2025
SCAPE
2859 East Coast Highway
Corona del Mar CA 92625
949.723.3406
https://scapesite.com/exibitions/upcoming-exhibitions
Tyler Stallings is a writer, filmmaker, artist, and curator based in Southern California. With over 30 years of experience, he has contributed to and edited numerous books and catalogs, offering insightful scholarship in contemporary art. To learn more about his work, visit www.tylerstallings.com.
