Art Review: Christie Serpentine's ambitious participatory art show “Nature vs. Nurture" at Revolt Gallery

TAOS — A pink glow beckons. Visitors remove their shoes and enter a spiral maze of salt and mirrors. In another room, some visitors kneel while others stick burning prayer candles into a sand-filled cattle trough. The mood is hallowed, if somewhat eerie. The materials — salt, sand, glass and fire — are elemental and raw. In a corner, heavy chains suspend an oversized pink glass tarot card — “The Lovers” — in what looks like a medieval torture device. Other cast glass objects — a snake and a pink apple — rest on pedestals. Videos of burning ropes and waning moons are projected on the walls. Everything is pink, white, gray or clear.

You’d be forgiven for thinking you have wandered into an extraterrestrial temple or the set of a new production of “Dune.” But this is Christie Serpentine’s “Nature vs. Nurture,” an ambitious new exhibition of sculptures and installation pieces created in the past seven months, which track her personal journey of artistic experimentation and psychological healing in the high desert.

Serpentine moved to New Mexico in 2020, shortly after graduating from the prestigious Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia to work for land art legend Charles Ross on his project “Star Axis.”

“That didn’t last,” she said. “After about six months, COVID unraveled everything. I lost my job and my housing abruptly and had nowhere to go with no money to my name.”

She spent the next few years rebuilding her life while also processing childhood traumas.

“The New Mexico landscape has absolutely influenced me, but not in the way people usually expect. It wasn’t about inspiring skies. It was about survival,” she said.

Snakes, which are plentiful here, resonated symbolically with Serpentine, who adopted her metonymic surname as a skin-shedding act of self-reinvention.

“Renaming yourself is seen as disruptive and peculiar. But for me, it was about stepping into an identity that wasn’t defined by trauma,” she said.

Throughout “Nature vs. Nurture,” Serpentine shows that radical change is possible. Even the physical properties of matter can change fundamentally. Heat up sand, it becomes glass. Put molten glass into a mold, it becomes anything from an apple to a snake. Tint it pink, and it becomes practically indistinguishable from a gem-quality stone.

In fact, in “The Desert Is the Sand,” Serpentine has embedded an authentic morganite gemstone into the forehead of her realistically rendered glass serpent. Gemstone or glass? The undulant serpent rests on ripples of sand. Sand or salt? Serpentine keeps us guessing as we move through the exhibition. More significantly, she reenacts her own experiences of psychological healing through the material transformations she performs.

I am reminded of other “magician” sculptors, from Joseph Beuys, who made shamanic use of felt and fat, to Eva Hesse, who bent minimalist shapes into soft organic skins, to fellow New Mexico-based artist Larry Bell, who traps illusions of infinity within plastic cubes. To this list, we can add Christie Serpentine, illusionist extraordinaire.

In “Greater than or Equal to, but Never Less,” a marble scale weighs a pile of crushed pink glass against a pile of powdery concrete rubble. The translucent glass is visually and emotionally lighter than the concrete, yet their actual weight is the same. Serpentine often uses pink to connote femininity, and it’s easy to imagine the concrete representing an old-school sculpture bro, the sort who likes to make monumental brutalist cubes. Serpentine’s scale functions as material evidence that her delicate pink glass sculptures are just as weighty — in every sense — as more macho-looking ones.

“Greater than or Equal to, but Never Less” also calls to mind the ancient Egyptian myth of the weighing of souls, where, to avoid becoming table scraps for a crocodile-headed goddess, one’s soul had to weigh less than a feather. In Serpentine’s reversal, the pink glass demonstrates its earthbound weightiness while remaining visually light and ethereal.

One standout piece in the show, “The Chains that Bind,” is a tall, open wooden structure, similar to a pillory or other medieval punishment device, covered in rough-textured concrete. Bound by chains in the top portion of this austere frame is a reproduction of the tarot card “The Lovers,” about the size of a speed limit sign and made from pink glass. Walk around to the back of the glass card, and one sees the phrase “over and over again i have had to conquer infinite hopelessness,” repeated ad infinitum in a lowercase cursive script — a reference to the chalkboard-writing punishment of generations past, famously immortalized by Bart Simpson in the opening credits to “The Simpsons.” Here, the phrase Serpentine repeats is not something she’s done wrong but a thing she’s done right. She has conquered infinite hopelessness. Or has she? The repetition itself implies an ongoing struggle. Vigilant though she may be, the hopelessness comes back, as in any Samuel Beckett story.

Like the other works in “Nature vs. Nurture,” “The Chains that Bind” lends itself to multiple readings, depending perhaps on one’s particular relationship to the concepts of love and hopelessness, but I interpret it as an exhortation to endure.

Serpentine is a playful alchemist who upends our perceptions and gets us to reconsider fundamental truths. The secular rites she invites us to perform — lighting candles, kneeling, navigating a salt maze — provide space for individual contemplation and healing.

Serpentine has written paragraph-long statements about each piece, which are available to read at the gallery. These statements are useful if you’re feeling confused or want to better understand her symbolic language. However, I would encourage anyone who makes the pilgrimage to “Nature vs. Nurture” to wander through the show without reading anything, at least at first. Because the work engages our bodies and our senses so directly, we can develop physical and emotional impressions of the interrelated works before we begin to interpret them symbolically.

Serpentine has transformed Revolt Gallery into a sacred space — one that’s unfamiliar yet welcoming. And though we may enter as strangers to an alien temple, if we take our time and engage sincerely, we just might find a portal into our own shape-shifting minds.

“Nature vs. Nurture” was organized by Sarah Stolar, who serves as the chair of Fine Arts, Film and Digital Media at University of New Mexico-Taos.

Art Review: Christie Serpentine's ambitious participatory art show “Nature vs. Nurture" at Revolt Gallery