San Francisco–based artist Lisa K. Blatt, who once called St. Louis home, is back in town this month with “Red Sky in Morning,” a video work and photographs now showing at Bruno David Gallery. This is her eighth solo show with the gallery, part of a four-artist exhibition that also features Joe Chesla, Stan Strembicki and Jean Mason, and runs through Oct. 25.
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From Antarctica to the Atacama
Blatt has spent years chasing big, wild landscapes. She has camped on a live volcano in Antarctica, joined a NASA science team in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and explored the Southwest desert solo. She takes those intense experiences and turns them into art. “Landscapes attract me with their light, beauty and simplicity. I stay for their darkness, complexity and secrets,” she says.
Capturing San Francisco’s ‘Orange Day’
“Red Sky in Morning” comes from a moment much closer to home: San Francisco’s eerie “orange day” in 2020, when smoke from wildfires turned the sky a glowing, end-of-the-world orange. The video captures that strange light and lets viewers sit with it for a while. “On the apocalyptic ‘orange day,’ my adopted home town had become an extreme landscape,” Blatt says. “Experiencing the ‘orange day’ reinforced my thinking that we are all connected and impacted by seemingly isolated events that happen to ‘others’ somewhere else. None of the smoke that caused the ‘orange day’ was from fires in San Francisco. Radiation from Fukushima affected Oregon seaweed.”
She hopes people meet the work where they are. “My work, which often examines the duality of beauty and horror, is multi-layered,” she says. “I hope people experience and take from the work whatever level feels right to them.”
Why It Matters for St. Louis
Gallery owner Bruno David says that connection is exactly what makes her work resonate here. “Her art carries to St. Louis the quiet mystery of distant landscapes, places unfamiliar to our eyes but rich with meaning,” he says. “Lisa Blatt’s newest work is a vital addition to St. Louis’s artistic landscape, not only for its striking visual presence but for the way it bridges science and art with rare clarity and imagination.”
Blatt’s work has shown in museums around the world, but this is a rare chance for St. Louis audiences to see it in person and maybe think a little differently about their own sky.
Who: Lisa K. Blatt (with Joe Chesla, Stan Strembicki, Jean Mason)
What: Four-artist exhibition featuring Blatt’s “Red Sky in Morning,” plus “Weighted,” “Art History Revisited,” and “Broken, But Beautiful”
Where: Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis
When: Through October
