In an early self portrait, the artist Chelsea Gustafsson appears in profile. It’s a unique and spirited piece that also affords the viewer great insight into the way the artist sees the world. In the work, Gustafsson’s face leans forward while an eye, shrouded in a black mask, peers out in deep fascination. The artist’s love of the natural world and concerns for the environment are also represented by five white feathers that adorn her ear while her strong desire to communicate through art, rather than words, is indicated by the coil of fair hair wrapped around her chin and covering her mouth. This empathetic, complex, thoughtful and often humorous point of view runs through all of Gustafsson’s work, but it is particularly on show here.
For Fish Out of Water, the artist has focussed her attention on the ocean’s most indomitable apex predator - the shark - to once again lay bare the complicated relationship between us humans and our broader environment. Rather than preach to the viewer about our collective destruction of our planet and the decimation of animal populations, however, Gustafsson prefers to explore our fear, fetishism and reverence for these majestic animals with the hope that the viewer will draw their own conclusions.
There is an inherent irony in the simpler works on display here. Toy sharks are strung up by their tails in the way fisherman have displayed their catches for centuries. A plethora of shark species, including hammerhead, tiger, great white, reef and mako, hang against pastel backgrounds like shocked or amused trophies plucked from the water after a child’s bath time.
For the more detailed still-lifes, Gustafsson was inspired by the Dutch vanitas paintings of the Baroque period. Rich in symbolism and developed to represent human vanity and the transience and futility of life, this intricate style was the perfect foundation for the artist to add to her canon. Examples of sharks in popular as well as classical culture are peppered throughout these works. Mad Magazine, Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon shark Jabberjaw, and pulp fiction book covers make an appearance. As does a rendering of John Singleton Copely’s 1778 painting Watson and the Shark, which depicts the rescuing of an English boy from an attack in Havana, Cuba. Reference books on sharks and photographs have also been included.
It could be argued, however, that it’s the addition of other, less obvious, totems that give these paintings their true depth. Fresh flowers, normally a representation of fragility and decay, have been swapped out for their plastic counterparts (which are both inferior and likely to survive long after we’re gone) while the lemon, traditionally seen as the bittersweet nature of life, is also the juice we squeeze over our fish and chips, the meat of which for many years was sourced from sharks. Gustafsson has also included scrunched up or torn paper and sticky tape to add “human mess” to her otherwise tightly executed tableaux.
It is the piece, Still Life Without Oceanic White Tip, that perhaps best represents the overall intent of this exhibition. In it a picture of a shark has been ripped from the scene and a tube of lotion, which may contain the shark liver oil used in cosmetics for decades, sits in the foreground. It’s the ornate gilded mirror, representing vanity and reflection, angled out of the frame, however, that gives the viewer pause and invites us to question our place within the world she has shown us. With Fish Out Of Water, Gustafsson is neither dogmatic nor anthropological. Instead she is respectful of human intelligence, rueful of our failings and concerned for our future - and here in lies her genius.