Chelsea Behle Fralick on Chantal Peñalosa

Untitled, 2017, diptych of inkjet prints on photographic paper, maple frame, 21 x 25 in. each

[Image description: Two color photographs in white frames, side by side. Each photo captures clouds in a blue sky. Below the photo on the left, text reads, “Tecate, Baja California, Mexico / 27.12.17 / 12:55p.m.” Below the photo on the right, text reads, “Tecate, California, EUA / 27.12.17 / 1:25p.m.”]

In Being Here With You/Estando Aquí Contigo: 42 Artists from San Diego and Tijuana (2018-19), the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s curators staged a rigorous regional exhibition, from which many remarkable works stood out to me. Yet Chantal Peñalosa’s conceptual photographic series, Untitled (2017)— which I encountered again in her spring 2021 solo show at Best Practice Gallery— remained with me long after, in a quietly seismic way.  

Hmm. “Seismic” may not be the best choice of words here, however poetic it feels. The piece— a photographic diptych of clouds, each photo framed with a placard of the place, date and time of the respective photo at the U.S./Mexico border— cannot be limited to such a terrestrial-based conveyance of feeling. “Voluminous” or “ethereal” don’t quite work either, for different reasons. Initial internal descriptions of “voluminous” clouds and heavenly “ethereal” landscapes become quickly reframed upon approaching the work and finding the embedded panel descriptions: conceptually-documentarian descriptions of the time and date of a border crossing. 

“Expansive”... 

“...in a quietly expansive way”. 

Let’s rest here for now, continue to reflect, and see where it takes us.

Untitled (detail), 2017, diptych of inkjet prints on photographic paper, maple frame, 21 x 25 in. each

[Image description: A color photograph of clouds in a blue sky. Below the photo, text reads, “Tecate, Baja California, Mexico / 27.12.17 / 12:55p.m.”]

Formally, Peñalosa’s cloud photos remind me, perhaps unsurprisingly, of John Ruskin’s famous cloud paintings (c. 1880s). Ruskin’s works— alongside the earlier cloudscapes of John Constable, J. M. W. Turner and others— helped to revolutionize dominant depictions of clouds in landscapes as a Romantic trope, turning the pastoral terrestrial landscape completely skyward, and beyond the mere mimesis of Renaissance clouds. Clouds, and the sky, were a constantly Romantic dramatic stage, and a natural conveyor of our wide range of deeply flawed human feelings: hopes and fears, the sublime and the transcendent. 

Ruskin’s own inner turmoils have long been projected onto his painted clouds by historians, and justifyingly so (reinforced, in part, by Ruskin’s apocalyptic vision of weather in his 1884 lecture series “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century”). Just like our fleeting thoughts and emotions, clouds are a realm that is deeply “us” and yet very much not “us.” Clouds are the realm we wish to inhabit, yet cannot in all real senses do so— more than, in our current era, flying at high speeds in a large metal cylinder while going somewhere else.

This aspect of going somewhere else is what Peñalosa taps into here, both within her text and within the clouds themselves. Formally, she first gives us (at least from across a gallery room) wispy, bright, dynamic clouds. Naturally shifting phenomena; never static, never contained. Then, she gives them a time and place through text. In the version of Untitled at the Best Practice show, the first photo’s adjoining text states, “Tecate, Baja California, Mexico / 27.12.17 / 12:55p.m.”, while the second photo’s text states, “Tecate, California, EUA / 27.12.17 / 1:25p.m.” 

Untitled (detail), 2017, diptych of inkjet prints on photographic paper, maple frame, 21 x 25 in. each

[Image description: A color photograph of clouds in a blue sky. Below the photo, text reads, “Tecate, California, EUA / 27.12.17 / 1:25p.m.”]

Going somewhere else through place: the first photo, always taken in Tecate in Mexico; the second, Tecate in southeastern San Diego (one can almost say, a single Tecate split in two by the border). Going somewhere else through time: the transit of time recorded between photos is always on the same date, just a short time apart. So, time and place considered together, with the clouds: two slightly shifted cloud photos, two close times, two (almost one) locations, become one piece. Become one (before and after) border crossing.

(There is, indeed, Something About The Weather Of This Place, as Peñalosa’s exhibition title suggests…)

Peñalosa herself describes this piece as “photo diptychs that record the subtle shifts in cloud formations that happen in the time it takes to cross the U.S./Mexico border.” [1] These clouds, therefore, transit the mindspace of the gallery viewer from visual generality (some clouds) to go somewhere else, into spatial and temporal specificity (these clouds here and now— giving context), captured but only for a moment. 

In other words, Peñalosa gives the clouds a container.

This is not a literal container like Peter Alexander’s resin Cloud Box (1966), or like Hans Haacke’s atmospheric Condensation Cube (1965). Rather, this is more directly a frame, a momentary border, around these otherwise fleeting shapes. The frame of these photographs reinforce the frames we place upon our sky (in the form of photographs), while the frames of these photographs on the gallery wall— photographs framed to encapsulate descriptive text— reinforce the borders we place upon our spaces and places as a whole.

The California-Mexico border, however, is not marked in the sky. How, then, can we justify this separation on land?

Of course, our sky does indeed have many invisible boundaries: as flyable sky space, with rules about who gets to inhabit it, albeit briefly (commercial airliners, the military), and who doesn’t (drones, border fence climbers). Yet when one views these photos, their frames make us question our frames, invisible and not. Our border, as a boundary, becomes arbitrary, expansive, limitless in the sky. It becomes arbitrary, and yet paradoxically, also enforced. A limitless space, restricted by small, petty humans.

In viewing the two photos and their texts together as one diptych work, we also factor in time alongside space within Untitled. And clouds, one might argue, are perhaps the most immediately apparent natural form of time-telling, even more so than a slowly setting sun and the night sky’s constellations. Yet there’s still a timelessness, and a placelessness, to this passage, perhaps because we have lost this ability to tell time through such phenomena in our natural world. Our rational contemporary monkey minds say, “Oh, it's only been 30 minutes,” but our contemplative, more expansive— and importantly, our traveling— mind says, “How much time has it been?” 

In the more calm circumstances of the day-to-day check-point border crossing, this time appears more in the form of the arbitrary: Why is there such a border below, when there is no border above? In the not-so-calm circumstances of undocumented crossings, this time appears more in the form of the enforced: There is still much daylight time. Keep moving, keep moving.

In certain ways, the early conceptualist Robert Barry’s Inert Gas Series (1969) speaks more directly to Peñalosa’s narrative here than Romantic Ruskin’s shifting clouds. Ruskin’s clouds never truly create a border beyond what is in our emotional minds: the feelings that create our inner demons and angels, so to speak. The sky and its clouds as a Christian-based revelation become fiery when in turmoil or inner anger, and light and bountiful with fluffy cumulonimbus when jovial. But Barry’s Inert Gas Series— for example, his Krypton piece— can be understood here as about the borders of some natural thing first contained, then made to expand once more. (Literally, the subtitle to the series is “From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion.”) 

Krypton, as a gas, has to be contained on Earth within a canister in order to be utilized. However, when Krypton is taken in a canister by Barry to a Beverly Hills park, then photographed upon its expansion (its release from the canister into the atmosphere immediately upon opening), the resulting photographs only appear to depict the park and its surroundings, rather than the natural (and completely invisible) gas. The object documented, the Krypton— contained within its own border, its canister, and then released— becomes almost besides the point. The act of photographing something that can never be fully photographed— that can never actually be fully contained— becomes a central critical line of Barry’s piece. 

Similarly, Peñalosa’s Untitled sets its formal frames, its borders, to make evident its depiction of something that can never be fully contained (our sky, our emotions, our human desire for connection beyond borders). The natural visual passage of time between the two photographs appears subtly altered, yet still entirely expansive— even hopeful, in one emotional reading of the clouds. The measurement in human-defined space and time within the descriptive texts, however, points to our human drive to restrict, to enforce, to place boundaries on things that, perhaps, we might need to loosen our grip upon. Perhaps we need to return that space and time— and thereby ourselves, even if briefly— to the unbounded forces of nature. To expansion.

Chelsea Behle Fralick is an art historian and lecturer at the University of San Diego.

Note
1. Chantal Peñalosa, There’s Something About The Weather Of This Place, Press Release, Best Practice Gallery, March 13 - April 17, 2021.