Clarissa Tossin at Commonwealth and Council

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Clarissa Tossin, Disorientation Towards Collapse (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

In January, the limp, ghostly shell of an entire fallen tree was sprawled across Commonwealth and Council’s two main galleries. The empty skin, encrusted with bark and chunks of dead wood, felt like the aftermath of a vampiric act, sucked dry and pallid. On the wall surrounding this gesture of depleted nature hung peaceful faces cast from porcelain, gesturing to a warmer human presence even as the menacing grin of Amazon’s logo peered through the nearby woven cardboard works. This blend of human, natural, and corporate references in Clarissa Tossin’s recent show, Disorientation Towards Collapse, resulted in an exhibition that read as a sort of cosmic warning. The works revealed the extent of our present tragedy, as we inhabit a world that is choking and heating from several decades of such warnings going more or less ignored.

Death by Heat Wave (Acer pseudoplatanus, Mulhouse Forest) (2021), the show’s centerpiece (and showstopper), is a silicone cast of a sycamore maple that died following a heatwave in the French countryside, not far from where Tossin was staying during a residency at La Kunsthalle Mulhouse. With its supine pose and hollow branches arranged in ropey, pulmonary clusters, it looked as if it were extruded from an enormous lung—which is ecologically fitting, given a tree’s primary function. This large sculpture was paired with two smaller branch sculptures made through the same process. Though they don’t share the same sublimity of scale, these more modest tangled tubes resemble a sort of physiological infrastructure extracted and mummified for display. One wall-mounted and the other inverted—hooked to the ceiling with its twigs crawling downward onto the floor—they are titled Rising Temperature Casualty (Prunus persica var. nucipersica, home garden, Los Angeles) and Rising Temperature Casualty (Persea americana, home garden, Los Angeles) (both 2021). Both were sourced from a tree in the artist’s backyard, and as the titles suggest, were also victim to rising temperatures, the limbs perhaps shed in an act of preservation. 

A threat is harder to ignore when it’s closer to home, or literally happening in your backyard. Such autobiographical components made the real threat of climate change feel more immediate than headlines of collapsing ice shelves and melting permafrost. Tossin’s presence within the artworks on view emphasized the immediacy of the threat. On the wall nearest the base of the tree’s trunk were six ceramic faces that together make up Becoming Mineral (2021). Made from casts of the artist’s face, some of the masks push the limits of recognizability—one of them is barely two eyes, a nose, and a chin, as if it were partially submerged in water. This liquid quality is bolstered by a marbling effect that was created by combining colored clays with a lighter-toned porcelain. The peaceful expression on the faces retreats, camouflaged behind the marbled surface. Whether read as death masks (not unlike the tree) or mineralized human fossils, they convey a sense of both departure and grounding. Something has departed, leaving a trace, or has been exchanged—the organic replaced by the mineral. In this work, Tossin commits her body to this inevitability, acknowledging and communing with its mineral origins.

Four works made from woven cardboard Amazon boxes take the autobiographical in a more circuitous direction. Tossin hails from Brazil, a country that thrives on Amazonian water even as its rainforests endure perpetual attack. Though one collage is made solely from Amazon boxes (and shares the title of the exhibition), the other three interlace extraplanetary photographs with the Amazon boxes using a traditional Brazilian weaving technique. Titled Future Geography (2021) and identified by the astronomical phenomena featured (Jerezo Crater, Mars; Shackleton Crater, Moon; and Hyades Star Cluster, respectively), the magical, almost abstract photographic prints crisscross with cardboard; the ubiquitous signs of global capitalism are easily identified. In the fully cardboard work, Disorientation Towards Collapse (2020), the enmeshed geometries of the flattened boxes’ Cheshire grin logos form a compositional “X” as if suggesting inextricable relationships between the cosmos, craftwork, and capitalism.

Amazon’s influence now stands to expand beyond the surface of the earth by way of Blue Origin, the aerospace and spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos that seeks to “expand, explore, find new energy and material resources, and move industries that stress Earth into space.”¹ As Amazon and other mega-corporations become more intertwined with the greater cosmos, once-distant futures now feel impending. This type of Bezosian hubris undermines dusty sci-fi fantasies, tainting their futuristic visions with present woes that we, perhaps naively, assumed we would one day escape. The boxes that arrive daily on doorsteps and in mailrooms are harbingers of an expanding human reach that, however hopeful and aspirational, is entangled with humanity’s endemic capacity to ignore existential warnings in favor of financial gain or convenience. By utilizing traditional materials and techniques like clay and weaving within a discourse about nature and its demise, Tossin presents a perspective with more nuance than a purely apocalyptic one—that beneath the technological and capitalist advances that continue to malign and sever our relationship to the earth, there resides a connection to it that may prove to be more enduring.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 28.

Clarissa Tossin, Rising Temperature Casualty (Prunus persica var. nucipersica, home garden, Los Angeles) (2021). Silicone and tree bark, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Clarissa Tossin, Becoming Mineral (detail) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Clarissa Tossin, Disorientation Towards Collapse (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Clarissa Tossin, Death by Heat Wave (Acer psudoplatanus, Mulhouse Forest) (detail) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Clarissa Tossin, Future Geography: Jezero Crater, Mars (2021) Amazon.com delivery boxes, archival inkjet print with matte lamination, and wood, 60 x 84 x 1.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Reuben Merringer is an L.A.-based artist, writer, and educator. His work explores liminality through the development of novel processes, utilizing the languages of painting, photography, sound, and video. He teaches at ArtCenter College of Design.

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