birds a’singin’ and bees a’buzzin’

Tomales Bay, a body of water just barely, just by a couple of miles, protected from the dizzying anonymity of the Pacific Ocean, is home to thousands and thousands of oysters. Every day small fishing boats leave wooden docks to harvest them from bags floating in the bay, farms that approximate a submerged environment. They return to sell these hard stones, these encrusted bodies, to day trippers and neighbors. When encountering motion, when brought from the country to the city, these creatures lose their crustacean form, become transmutable, and then become their destroyer. I’ve never before lingered on the oyster, an over-valued rock for sure, but I relate them now, surprising myself, to Sheff’s compositions, to carnal desire, to need and to dissolution.

“The crust of various cosmic bodies is temporary,” writes Paul Klee in his notebook, “our faltering existence on the outer crust should not prevent us from recognising this.”

In the painting “Meadowsweet and Hemlock” overlapping planes sit side by side, one beside the other, overlapping and touching. In their difference they create depth, in their reducibility they create communion. The artist nestles her name among them, offering herself up as an interchangeable moment in a field of perspectives. Color touches color. Shades near rot are germane to subsequent shades. Subsumption isn’t bad.

To say a painting “pulls you in” isn’t a very interesting thing to say, but what is meant, perhaps, that a painting has the ability to collapse exteriority and to render perspective flat, equilateral, well, that’s interesting. Here, Daisy Sheff’s works summon notions of the country. Not a country, but the country. A vague, mythological place conjured from internal ‘maginations.