The Current: Baha Mar Gallery and Art Center, Scope Art Show, Miami Beach, Miami, Florida
December 3 – 8, 2019
Lynn Parotti is preoccupied with the environment in all its multifaceted connotations. She has a consuming passion for the natural landscape of the Bahamas where she was born, particularly the intoxicating world of the ocean. But she is equally concerned with the social geography of place; the human experience and relationship to these locations, the historical traces, the economic and environmental impact and consequences. Her sensuous revelling in the beauty of nature is increasingly counter-balanced by a politicised awareness of its imperilled state due to climate change and the attendant crises of rising sea levels, the depletion of natural resources, the consequences of coral bleaching, the availability of clean water. She also references the human toll through allusions to migration, coastal communities, subsistence fishing and poverty.
People who live between two homes often possess a heightened awareness of the intricacies of those spaces they leave and return to. While based in London, Parotti is particularly attuned to the vulnerability of small island developing states. Her restless landscapes speak to the sublime beauty and eroding forces of nature but also their precarious condition. The push and pull of oil paint, its malleable and viscous potential and heightened colour, conveys an energy which is both sensuous and unsettling, a duality which references the uncertain condition of our contemporary existence in this world, but also the potential for renewal.
Coral reefs, an important focus in much of Parotti’s recent paintings, are home to the highest biodiversity of any ecosystem on the planet. This is turn sustains a sea life upon which more than 500 million people depend for survival, most of these in poor countries. With global warming and climate change, reefs have suffered coral bleaching and are at risk of extinction. The title of this exhibition, 2 Degrees C refers to the imperative to limit global average temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels if the coral reefs are to survive.
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