Eli Thorne
Nature Piss

April 9 - May 14, 2022
620 Kearny St.

Reception: Saturday, April 9, 4:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Masks required

Nature Piss, a new body of work by Eli Thorne, blurs entangled facets of the artist’s childhood with a desirously embodied present, evidenced across painted landscapes and jury-rigged assemblages of conjured body parts or structures of curious scale. As ritualized offerings to former utterances of self, Thorne’s work summons a transtemporal world-building which makes space for its past. A childhood where he remembers wishing to pee standing up, peppered with imagined flashes of pissing off a cliff, or upstream into a river. It is not just that Thorne’s landscapes allude to his desire for physiological or surgical change, but for a radical reorientation to context and environment.

A shag-carpeted bench sets the stage for Eli’s sculptural works of counterintuitive scales, excessively elongated urination devices tower over a horse in a puddle of his own yellow rebellion, even the play house has pissed itself. Are these plexiglass forms underneath Thorne’s toyish sculptures puddles of refusal? Tubes and twine collide into stand-to-pee devices, as if made under duress or an impending sense that one is running out of time–as we are reminded by the occasional skull resting in Thorne’s paintings. These objects have a scavenger’s sensibility, constructed from what is available, reachable, and shiftable in the lived environment of the High Desert where Thorne maintains his studio practice.

There is a decidedly cherished clunkiness maintained in works like Up North Nature Pee and Stand to Pee Boulder Creek, as if the symbols which construct his landscapes were scattered like dice and frozen in time. Whittled into soft emblems, each piece landing somewhere flat and pleasurable. Mountains and streams jitter into legible signifiers of place without balance, where one loses their footing in fuzzy temporal collapses of day and night. Places where the boundary between body and atmosphere open through the slit of one’s penis, a psychically emerging genital which Thorne returns to his childhood self and the landscapes he played within.

It is this porousness of the body which looms over Nature Piss despite the relative absence of human figures. As viewers, we are invited to remember that our bodies evacuate fluids back into waterways, rivers and oceans. The hydrological systems embedded in us are interdependent with the larger hydrological concerns of the earth. Within us and outside of us, water erodes illusions of stability, singularity and wholeness. We transmute and move fluids through flesh, repeating and swirling back into our lived environment.

-Creighton Baxter