Employing the notion of spatial mapping to a different end,and drawing form a larger body of work that explores geopolitics through landscape, Blane De St. Croix interrogates the notion of boundary and division in his project, (Detainment Map). Already Menacing in its suggestion of something that needs to be contained, and its inexplicable presence in the park, the fence is further anchored to a specific reference, taking its perimeter shape from the detainment center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Its abstraction of content and scale keeps it from didactic critique, while the viewers ability to actually enter the isolated interior makes the political gesture that much more present.
-Shamim M. Momin, from SKW 2009 catalogue essay

CROSSING THE LINE:
"Only a week left to see one of the more pointedly poetic and political sights in New York: Blane De St. Croix’s 80-foot model of a slice of the Mexican-U.S. border. Lovingly detailed with hills, rocks, trees, and (of course) fencing, it expresses the desolation, desperation, and absurdity of trying to wall off one country from another. It makes both the sculpture and the policy debates seem that much more diabolical and impossible
— Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine Review, April 13, 2009

.

.

.

Everyday we walk the earth. We travel across roads that stretch through flat lands and hills. We even attempt to engage either rural or forested settings in search of the romantic pastoral. However a monolithic mountain range usually brackets all human activity, leaving most of the minute details belonging to the landscape as visually and physically inaccessible, stunting the growth of an ecological awareness. Beauty is seen first and then experienced as peace, leading anyone to set aside concerns caused by man-made disasters. Blane De St. Croix’s Mountain Strip takes a site previously encountered in West Virginia and makes it specific to Black & White Project Space. In doing so, De St. Croix merges interior with exterior and uses both the environment and human ignorance as his muse to investigate the various complexities underlying geopolitics. By presenting the inverted fragment of a mountain top, the artist elicits questions surrounding the continued viability of landscape itself.

.

Nature has historically served as metaphor for the chaotic, the uncontrolled as well as the blissful idyll that one can always escape to. It has functioned, additionally, as a symbol of human consciousness while carrying a sense of mystery due to its controlled, static representation. The contemplation of nature has become equivalent to the process of personal meditation, placing reason against contradiction. But many are remiss to consider the danger of nature until a tragic event strikes: “The fundamental desire could be described as the desire for paradise, or perhaps the demand for it – for the city on a hill; for a more perfect union; for getting to the mountaintop.”1 Blane De St. Croix reveals that we are in a new era of enlightenment, one that involves a subjective evaluation of everything that is seen and experienced, setting the stage for a much-needed practical response. Moreover, the artist’s attempt to visually unify human kind with something so gigantic, undeniably arouses feelings of fear and awe. However, the artist is not a romantic but, instead, a pragmatic who suggests the need for a detailed dialogue about our lived, physical relationship to the world.

.

In the past, the representation of sweeping landscapes astoundingly captured human vulnerability, as industrial civilization migrated further away from nature, toward the urban center. We no longer live in the era of Romanticism even though landscape and nature are ironically viewed in the same, detached manner. Theodor Adorno defined the individual’s association with society as, “the relationship of the particular, the particular interests, the behavior of the individual, particular human being and the universal that stands opposed to it…it would be quite wrong and a crude mistake if in this conflict between the universal and the particular we were to place all the blame on the side of the universal from the outset, and attribute all the good to the individual.”2 Nature is once again the muse of human reason.

.

Blane De St. Croix complements his monolithic sculptural installation with a highly detailed drawing process that sustains the flair of landscape’s overwhelming seduction. By creating a series of small depictions, the artist renders different facets of his experience with the site itself, in this case the strip-mined landscape of West Virginia. However the paradox exists in nature’s loyal beauty, which always appears pristine when seen from areas that the public is provided access to. Usually experienced as either a broad vista or an extreme detail, a sense of urgency is not sparked, leaving an unanswered question which, to many, locates itself a distance away from daily life.

.

Landscape has also signified the future, the frontier and the realm of the unrestricted. Even though early naturalists like Henry David Thoreau believed erosion to be an extension of the earth’s evolution, “the presumption was that the wilderness was out there, somewhere, in the western heart of America, awaiting discovery, and that it would be an antidote for the poisons of industrial society. But of course the healing wilderness was as much the product of culture’s craving and culture’s framing as any other imagined garden.”3 When the environment is combined with the fourth dimension, time, life continues on.

.

Blane De St. Croix was strongly affected by the strip-mining industry in West Virginia and makes one wonder if there is a way to look at landscape and remain critical of the histories that have played out upon it. Can one feel the state’s political endorsement of permanent environmental destruction along with the economic hardships felt by an under-educated class of miners, who know not of their union’s history but only their immediate present? Ken Casey’s beat-era novel Sometimes a Great Notion from 1964 first exposed the paradox of freedom and independence. But Casey’s narrative gets lost within the intricate details of landscape, leaving the rift between a logging family and its laborers as something slightly less significant. De St. Croix’s Mountain Strip, however, effectively addresses the drastic ecological alterations made by the entire strip-mining industry, the equivalent of a mountain turned upside down.

--Jill Conner, art critic and curator based in New York City.

Eighty feet long, seven feet tall at its highest and two feet wide, Broken Landscape, Blane De St. Croix’s painstakingly hand - produced miniature reconstruction of a selected section of an American border town along the Rio Grande, slices and curves impressively through the Smack Mellon space in Brooklyn. With an under frame of wood all of the visible natural forms including cliffs, trees, rocks, soil, shrubs, cliffs, stratum, side and ground, macadam are hand – made from both natural and synthetic materials. The tiny fence is constructed from thin wire and basswood. It has over 5,000 vertical pieces. The actual fence that the miniature one refers to is one of many fragmented sections under construction with the largest section ending up being approximately 670 miles long. The fence in real-life terms stands 14 feet high. It is constructed of welded steel imbedded in concrete footing poured in the road and covered after the fence’s installation. The road along the fence remains and the border patrol keep the fence-wall under surveillance using vehicles, often with air assist.

At Smack Mellon, Broken Landscape’s heft and thrust paradoxically serves as a barrier to the viewer, as if to reiterate the narrative that it bears inscribed on its own body, that of the USA-Mexico border fence and surrounding landscape of Eagle Pass, Texas. Because of Broken Landscape’s extension in space, as a road, the observer moves through it as well as above the landscape (1). Audience participation adds to the drama and grim humor of the piece; visitors speaking to each other from one side of the piece to the other, that is from the American side of the border to the Mexican side of the border, can, physically and literally speaking see eye-to-eye over the border-line, and joining hands over it, symbolically rendering the limits on Otherness null and void.

As the eye travels along its length in the gallery space it sees the recreation of that locale’s Bridge I, part of Highway 57 that cuts into Garrison Street and that goes into Mexico. Following the overpass’s road, Ryan Street, which dead-ends at the Bridge, the viewer sees De St. Croix’s rendition of the Eagle Pass Golf Course. Despite its monumental ethos Broken Landscape acts as a distended or extended close-up, a hand-fashioned synecdoche for the 3169 km (1969 miles) border situation itself. Broken Landscape, with its documentary stillness and precision, serves to recall a “fragment ” of space from which we can extrapolate and project a general or universal picture in our imaginations of the border situation, subtly melodramatized and sensationalized. In great measure Broken Landscape succeeds visually because, as art, De St. Croix’s social agenda is palpable while the diorama is curiously discursive and indeterminate, so carefully are the specifics and universals melded together in this work. This is a history piece, certainly, yet it is also a work that appears suspended in time, appearing in some ways as if it exists anterior to time. Broken Landscape’s narratological structure allows us to project our own emotional truth through a metaphoric or symbolic equivalency as we move from depictions of foothills of diminishing/ascending heights and perceive shifting terrains along with changing social conditions from rural to exurbia to suburbia. The result is that while we feel an actualized, frozen-in-time environs that refers to the actual locale of Eagle Pass the entire experience takes on added intimations of an evacuated, anthropological, yet, somehow eerily mythic place.

The mere idea or intentionality of delimiting wilderness, in fact or imagination is culturally charged and historically specific. Blane De St. Croix has made models of troubled, contentious hot-spots in the world perfectly convincingly rendered in perfect scale that explore the terms of boundary vs. limits, movement, separation, territorialization. In a strong way De St. Croix’s work involves landscape’s relation to geography as inscribed by what Foucault has termed an “archeology of knowledge”, a memoir –map serving as an instrument of power. The charged subjects of De St. Croix’s art since 2007 are the philosophical, phenomenological, cultural and political implications of demarcating and boundary setting. (2) At its core De St. Croix’s current work deals with modeling topological settings that are reflective of geographic, cartographic and social dimensions, that refer to actual time-space realities as well as to what Henri Le Lefebvre terms the “anthropological stage” of social reality. (3). The artist’s impulses reflect on what it means in terms of desiring-drives when we set up of boundaries and borders, demarcation points, and limits. His work explores borders as a source of security, as territory invested with heterological space of difference and potentiality, but also as a site of retrenchment and of impasse, of refusal. In it broadest terms the artist’s Broken Landscape and others like it explore “them” versus “me” mindset in its psychological and phenomenological dimensions. It has of course a political agenda as it bears down on issues of control and of hegemony. (4)

Blane De St. Croix, forever fascinated with fixity versus liminality has created a body of work that asks the viewer to consider the crucial need for dialectical structures that can accommodate difference and dialog so as to keep communicative breakdown at a minimum. A commentator notes: “To respond is to be engaged with someone else; simultaneously it is to remain different or diverse…To respond is to pursue further and yet to cross, to mesh but not to fuse, to be inside the interlocutor’s discourse and outside at the same time. Not to be absorbed by the other’s voice, but not to cease hearing it either.”(5)

Blane De St. Croix’s new work is a meditation on the possibility and impossibility of intersubjectivity.Its an ode to the need for discourse, a discourse on the relation of the Self to the Other. It attempts to reflect positively on what constitutes an identification towards communitas, even a vestigial one, and what it takes for its heart to keep on beating in spite of forces hellbent on denying its existence.

- Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic based in New York. From Smack Mellon / Broken Landscape Exhibition 2009

.

.

.

Even if you mentally draw a line from Robert Smithson up through Richard Serra, you may still not be physically or spiritually ready to encounter Blane de St. Croix's latest installation, Mountain Strip, at Black and White Project Space in Williamsburg. Entering the sculpture courtyard behind the gallery was, for me, comparable to exiting the train station in Cologne, where its huge glass windows permit the German city's collosal, brooding Gothic cathedral to visibly crash down upon you, making you feel tiny and naughty and scared. Indeed, Mountain Strip so dwarfs the viewer that at first you may not be able to take it all in and realize that what you're looking at is a sculpture of an entire mountain ridge that's been violently ripped from the earth and suspended, upside down, in the outdoor space (it continues from the courtyard, through the wall, into the gallery space).The green foliage running along the top (make that the bottom) of the work provided me the first clue that this was a geological representation, and then the earthly brown subterranean section (now at the top) with its tangles of torn roots and massive rock formations helped orient me further. But, even upside down, what kind of mountain has such oddly rhythmical and barren sides? It's not a hospitable place, obviously, I thought. And that section doesn't look natural.It dawned on me eventually...

.......Learning that the geometrical grooves in the mountainside are man made makes the installation all the more overwhelming and makes the fact that some visitors have suggested the work would be a good backdrop for sitting and meditating seem somewhat strange to me, but there is a horrible beauty in not only the scale of the work, but also how light floods over the top (bottom) and bleeds through the bottom (top) of the mountain. I hear it's particularly spectacular at dusk.

--Edward Winkleman, November 2009

.
.
.

Walk through the interior of Black and White Project Space to the back courtyard and you will run into a behemoth geological model— flipped upside down. Blane De St. Croix’s sculpture, called “Mountain Strip,” is a 40-by- 22-foot miniaturization of the Kayford Mountain Ridge in West Virginia, an area that has been strip-mined using the destructive method of mountaintop removal. The vast majority of what you see in front of you, however, is not the mountain but deep layers of subterranean rock and sediment. Lay on your back underneath the installation and you will get a wonderful bird’s-eye-view of the lush green topography—as well as views of land flattened by mining companies. This is environmental activist art at its finest.

--Trent Morse from WG NEWS November 2009

Twisted, stretched, and rolled, the elongated tongues in his Tongues Scroll-illustrated by drawing with graphite and burnt food-annunciated a specific language that is at once inaudible yet uncannily deafening. In Severed Tongues, De St. Croix’s heavy, hammered, and worn tongues are freed from the constraints of the mouth to rest freely on the ground as grave-like mounds of earth.

-NEW ART, catalogue, 2003, Michael Rush, Director, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art

Blane De St. Croix site-specific installation titled Common Roost is gorgeous and consists of approximately 500 black birds installed din a healthy Gumbo Limbo tree. The birds appear to be a living community, perched and taking in the sun until you realize they are not moving at all. Suddenly the tree seems lifeless like the birds themselves. Then it reverses and the entire sculpture appears to be alive again, a continual shift of perspective between life and death.

-SCULPTURE KEY WEST, catalogue, Glen Gentele, Director Laumeier Sculpture Park, 2007

Common Roost, as the sculpture is called, is the latest in a long line of De St. Croix pieces that have put an "unnatural spin on natural imagery. (Among his previous creations: a tree trunk covered with glass eyes.) "This is a bad comparison, but I might be the opposite of Thomas Kinkade," he says, referring to the famously kitschy artist know as "The Painter of Light." He shows us these perfect dream images, but that isn’t the kind of life we live in. I don’t want to call the work "dark", because people get scared by that. But theirs is an edge to nature that I like to acknowledge.

-Key West Magazine, GALLERIES, Dawn deBoer, February 2007

This exhibition spans ten highly productive years of Blane De St Croix’s mid-career work, and provides a welcome opportunity to assess the continuity and consistency of his efforts. During the same decade, roughly 1990-2000, many artists focused on the stuff of urban life, offering ironic commentaries on consumerism and the question of originality. But throughout this assembly of highly crafted objects and environments by De St. Croix, we are offered an alternative perspective on modern life, one that considers society’s precarious interface with the natural world. With the cool remove of an anthropologist, De St. Croix observes natural history and human folly to create tableaux that haunt us with harsh truths and wry ironies about the world and our obligation to seriously heed history’s lessons.

Using a distinct vocabulary he extracts from nature more than industry, De St. Croix has developed a language of images that serve his motivations well. His commentaries on the present are dependent on his respect for the past. His use of twigs, earth, wood, leaves, clay and straw conjure an ancient language that is somehow so familiar that it needs little translation. Each of these pieces render old and difficult questions with an immediacy that straddles our history and our future.

Among the more recent works is De St Croix’s Tongues in Soil, an installation that consists of a wall of topsoil from which cast iron tongues emerge in a random pattern. The tongue is the primary instrument of both language and taste and signifies both elemental human needs and our distinction from other animals. The disembodied tongues on the earthen vertical space suggest the many voices of Babel, each language alienated from the next until the sounds are senseless. As the tongues silently plead to be heard, the soil assumes an equally powerful role as the ground of Being from whence human identity sprang. The associated works, Iron Tongues and Organ of Speech and Taste, both in bas relief, are unsettling in their rigidity and permanence. It is as if the voices of the past have been stilled, and we the living must relearn the languages that speak to the earth.

Shadow Gathering, also a very current installation, comprises a host of hand-crafted wooden puppets suspended by differing lengths of string to create a cluster of ghostly homunculi confronting us from the recesses of a darkened space. Numbering 350, their elongated, monochromatic and lifeless forms create smoky shadows on the platform below, like memories of a lost civilization made briefly tangible. An audio element reinforces their totemic presence, which is at once foreign and familiar. We see ourselves reflected in this haunting tribe, witnessing their past and glimpsing our future. With Shadow Gathering De St. Croix seems to be reminding us of our ancestry, of a lost communion of souls in harmony with the earth. It is a sorrowful legacy – one that makes orphans of us all.

De St. Croix’s pursues his interest in communal memory in various other works such as Fallen, Vanishing and the Rare Pages series. These installations share a sense of bereavement that is also present in Shadow Gathering. Each of these room-sized presentations leaves us with a sense of longing for elemental human qualities that seem to elude us in contemporary life. Fallen possesses the memorial tone of a proscenium after the play has ended. Only the props remain: collapsing ladders that lead neither up nor down on a wall of dirt that seems far more permanent than man’s constructions. Fallen implies that all human efforts have failed, and the ladders that once climbed toward promise have now dissembled in futility. But as with many of De St Croix’s works, there is an inherent dichotomy. This is a picture of our deteriorating relationship with truth, but the wall of soil that holds the frail structures also suggests the omnipotence of nature.

Soil, Ladders and Three Legged Stools is associated with Fallen by virtue of its shared vocabulary of rough-hewn ladders and a wall of soil. But by including the three-legged stools, De St. Croix renders the environment as a narrative. We anticipate a history lesson as we imagine our ancestors at one with nature, and using its resources thoughtfully. At the same time, we sense the absence of such values as we are reminded of the elusive truth that history offers.

Vanishing is a taxonomic catalogue of extinct North American animals. Again we are called upon to understand the high price of human society and to acknowledge the loss each extinction inflicts on our shared collective conscience. Two walls, each with 308 individual ceramic tiles in grid formation spanning 25 feet document history’s memory. Each tile shows the crude, incised image of an extinct creature, as though the draftsman was also of a vanished time. Like Maya Lin’s Viet Nam Memorial, the expanse of this hieroglyphic index is humbling. We are reminded that the animals’ disappearance is often caused by our willful presence, and that the eradication of these creatures contributes to our own suffering. We are made to feel incidental in the face of such losses.

De St. Croix began a series called Rare Pages prior to making Vanishing. Rare Pages IV articulates the endangered species issues as an archive of earth’s memory. These 600 incised drawings with gold sizing on stucco are filed in eight 8 feet long horizontal files located at varying heights on a wall. The higher shelves are accessed with rolling library ladders, suggesting that some effort will be required to encounter the work thoroughly. Each compartment contains separate images of endangered species which the viewer can pull out from its place to contemplate as a single profound subtraction from nature’s roll call. The clinical atmosphere of this space suggests the extent to which man has removed himself from nature, and the ease with which he can file away the wealth of irretrievable life.

Stations of the Cross speaks to the mutual dependence of man and nature. A solemn, altar-like arrangement of steel podiums displaying burned book forms are aligned with panels of raw wood on the wall. The book as a fragment of the human interpretation of life is thus posited against the tree and its innate memory of ancient time. The metamorphosis from tree to book, from unadulterated nature to processed intellect is explicit, and the burned edges of the bark and binding suggest that both nature and human consciousness are at risk.

Among all of De St. Croix’s environments, Bed of Wicker, Bed of Straw, Bed of Clay is perhaps the most visceral statement about his own experience of making art related to the earth. Conceived while in residency in Ireland, and informed by his own Irish heritage, this site-specific installation was created in a former army barracks. Having seen the ancient Irish methods for drying and storing potatoes on low-lying pallets made of straw in barns throughout the region, De St. Croix transposed the agricultural model onto the military building. The bed-like form lying in the middle of the empty room is a poignant image of loneliness, sorrow, and death. And yet the potato is the ubiquitous symbol of Irish survival. So again we see De St. Croix’s adroit emotional contrasts that restrain us from ultimate conclusions. We are drawn to the bed as a fundamental human construct, we are instinctively mournful when we sense the absence of an inhabitant, and we return to the bed as the site for nurturing both body and soul. Using indigenous materials in the sparest context De St. Croix has distilled the essence of this forlorn place.

It is De St. Croix’s ability to present conflicting states of being in one work that keeps us looking. Whether combining history with mythology, as in Vanishing, or language and taste with alienation, as in his Tongues series, or ancestry and the premonition of our future, as in Shadow Gathering, the authenticity of the work prevails. De St. Croix’s agility with materials has been carefully honed into a language that conveys his concern for life’s verities and transgressions. Part philosopher, part shaman, and a serious artist, De St. Croix has already made a valuable contribution to the art of our time.

-BLANE DE ST CROIX 2001, CATALOGUE ESSAY by Daphne Anderson Deeds a free lanced writer and art consultant, previously Acting Chief Curator, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and Curator of Exhibitions and Programs, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

"With the cool remove of an anthropologist, De St. Croix observes natural history and human folly to create tableaux that haunt us with the harsh truths and wry ironies about the world and our obligation to seriously heed history’s lessons"

-CULTURE, Palm Beach County Council, March/April 2003, Leon Rubin

… sculptor Blane De St. Croix is winning awards and recognition for his inventive ways of finding art in an unusual body part: the tongue… Two tongues rest on adjoining metal pillows. The scene is mute and rather forlorn, like some human relationships. In another work, tongues flop like markers from metal books, inspiring thoughts about the links between the oral and written word. In tongue scrolls, long strips of paper are suspended from the wall, extending gracefully across the floor. They contain dark, wavering images drawn in graphite, with burned food ground into the paper as a kind of highlight. Why burned food? Because of the Irish potato famines of the 19th century and the macabre notion of "the black tongue"". De St. Croix heard of the phenomenon form and Irish poet while working in Ireland a few years ago. " The black tongue was a mark on a person that was noticed when they speak," he said . "It is meant you were going to die. When people are starving, they are so desperate for food they will eat the grass and the grass will blacken the tongue. As explained to me, the black tongue signified the last stages of death." The story got the artist thing. Like the human heart, the tongue could be used to evoke a host of "layered meaning." It’s "obviously a method of communication, which can be positive, or it can be destructive," he said. "The tongue can also represent non-communication."

-THE PALM BEACH POST, July 20, 2003, Gary Schwan

The majority of de St. Croix's works are sculptural wall pieces, surreal compositions featuring multiple castings of body parts such as the tongue and the hand. These are well-crafted and thought-provoking mixtures of humor and seriousness. But the masterwork here is a separate, darkened room filled with nearly 300 hanging wooden marionettes. The dangling bodies hover in the space like lording tribal gods, their aged, wooden skins looking as if they had been unearthed in some archaeological dig. This is an army of totemic figures to be reckoned with. These are multiples with an impact. This is one set of people figures that will not easily be forgotten.

-In Entertainment, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sunday, May 5, 2001, Jeff Daniel

Two installations stand out for both their dynamic conception and subtle execution. Gathering Secrets by Blane De St. Croix is another powerful installation. It offers a narrow entrance into a dark room that seems to stretch into infinite space. Dangling form the ceiling is a seemingly endless cluster of loosely jointed wooden puppets, some positioned at eye-level and others that peer down at viewers with eyes of glittering, crushed glass. Each puppet is roughly chiseled with different features and emanates and alluring sent of freshly carved wood. A whispering, hard-to-decipher voice repeats the root meaning of the work "shadow". Three galleries featured tongues, hands, and puppets as sensory organs and objects that symbolize communication and its limits. In Tongues in Soil, a metaphor for human speech, anthropomorphic wolf, gorilla, and other tongues are embedded in an earthen wall. This work faced solid iron and brass crowds of tongues set in frames, titles Iron Tongues and Organs of Speech and Taste. At the opening, varied comments from viewers- that the tongues were laughing or tormented, ugly or beautiful-hinted that this exhibition was also a psychologically revealing test. "The tongues started with my strong Irish heritage," the artist says. "At a sculpture symposium in the Republic of Ireland, I discovered that some contemporary Irish poets use the black tongue to represent times of famine. Starving people would eat dirt and grass as a last resort and their black tongues were a sign of malnutrition and approaching death." The ubiquitous hands shown in the next gallery are all different, yet all turn out to be the artist’s hand, another sign that his representations are self-conscious process. In Chiefly Occupied with the Pursuit of Pleasure, hands in various positions and degrees of surface finish hold butterflies opening and closing their wings… The viewer entered the final installation, Shadow Gathering, by parting a heavy curtain. Inside, about 300 puppets, 18 to 48 inches long, were suspended at various heights from the ceiling. Their bodies, formed from chunks of wood that had been wired together, created primary, secondary, and even tertiary shadow worlds on the floor. A babble of sounds suggested the beginnings of speech. Coarse-feathers, the puppets’ eyes are made from hammered nuggets of broken glass. Three or so pairs of ribs on each chest-made by gouging out the area below each rib- seem as primal and as classic as the lines in the I-Ching hexagram or a Dogon carving……"The puppets become metaphors for the human condition, existing in their own and each others’ shadows."

-SCULPTURE MAGAZINE, October 2001, VOL. 20, No. 8, Jan Castro

A wall sculpture called Faded Flora is striking. It’s etched lead sheet by artist Blane De St. Croix. It features ghostly images of leafy things.

-THE PALM BEACH POST, May 28, 1999, Gary Schwan

Blane de St. Croix combines industrial building materials with the ancient materials of art, from wax to gold leaf, in order to focus on "the rigid boundaries of human encroachment on the natural world". Rare Pages IV, (1997) is a library of over 700 drawings of endangered species in North America. The artist has used a crude instrument to incise images of stucco mixed with pigment onto gold-sized masonite. The drawings are shelved in eight horizontal black wood files, each eight feet long. Because the library is as sleek and elegant as Danish furniture, it is easy to "read" it the wrong way—as a pretty artifact. And the "collection" is high on the wall, so the viewer must herself risk mounting and descending the three rolling library ladders to see the shelved texts. Even then the marks may be hard to make out or the labels indistinct, as if they were already disappearing. These many levels of irony and craft make this an important work.

-SCULPTURE MAGAZINE, December 1997, Vol. 16, No. 10, Jan Castro

"My favorite piece of the six is by a California Artist, Blane de St. Croix Rare Pages VI . The piece engages us physically as we climb the ladders and mentally as we think about the way we store for posterity our memories of things that no longer exist. But Rare Pages VI also is a terrific piece to just stare at form a distance - it displays the sleek modernism of Scandinavian furniture."

-The Denver Post, Thursday, June 16, 1996, Arts & Entertainment, Steven Rosen

Division by Blane De St. Croix
Sixty-one nesting boxes carefully crafted specifically for bluebirds are reflection of land development and human population increases as they affect nature. Loss of natural habitat has made the bluebird’s habitat has made the population unstable and forced a replacement of natural nesting areas by artificial ones, such as the typical birdhouse. The sameness of the birdhouse. The sameness of the birdhouses mocks the repetitiveness of the typical birdhouse. The sameness of the typical birdhouse mocks the repetitiveness of many housing developments. Following the Connemara exhibition, the nesting boxes will be distributed for continued use through the Heard Natural Science Museum and Wildlife Sanctuary in McKinney.

-The Dallas Morning News, Saturday, March 12, 1994

On Our Cover
Against nature" evolved St. Louis artist Blane De St. Croix, sensitive to the encroaching development around Connemara, has created an entire subdivision of birdhouses.

-Plano Profile, April 1994, Mike Newman

Titled "Vanishing" this group of works by Blane De St. Croix of St. Louis are pleas to protect endangered animals and condemnations of those who kill them of pleasure of profit. The show’s masterpiece is two facing walls lined with dozens of ceramic tiles, each sculpted with a different image of an endangered species of North America, excluding plants. Not only does this giant work drive home the magnitude of the threat, each tile resembles a fossil- an ominous allusion to what fate might have in store for some of these animals. The tiles can be seen in the larger and most successful of the two rooms of the show, which has been hung handsomely.

-Sunday World-Herald, Art Magazine, August 1, 1993

"Especially in the last few years, environmental issues have formed grist for the artmaking mill, and two current one-person exhibitions succeed in forwarding those issues with a minimum of didacticism and maximum visual impact. Part of the strength of Cyphers’ work, though is that it allows for interpretations other than that spelled out above while remaining visually rich and rewarding. That is also true for Blane De St. Croix’s installation at Joy Horwich Gallery, which includes large painting of oil and mixed media sculptural objects. The paintings are the real centerpieces, dense, dark tow-dimensional silhouettes of endangered species such as the maned wolf and jaguar in a manner reminiscent of cave paintings as well as contemporaries such as Susan Rothenberg. St. Croix achieves this density and massiveness by starting out with a heavily textured layer of stucco on board. He draws directly on that surface by cutting out a line rendering, then applies layer after layer of gold pigment floating in varnish. Although the images itself is flat, the layers of translucent varnish provide depth, like an artifact preserved in amber, while allowing the work to hold and refract light in its fissures and mottled areas with extraordinary variety. The paintings thus achieve a near- mystical aura and force that is hard-won and impressive. With the paintings, the sculptural components of St. Croix’s installation evoke a sort of taxonomic library of endangered species. Several heavy lead binders hold scores of "pages"—deft ink drawings of birds and animals on shooting targets. Huge steel shelves cover one half of the wall and hold a hundred or so similar drawings incised in what appear to be slabs of concrete. By his choice of materials, St. Croix subtly reminds us of the various means by which human populations threaten animals, from the lead of bullets and hunting to the steel and stone building that leads to the destruction of habitat. The cumulative effect of the installation is powerful indeed, a testament both to St. Croix’s thoughtfulness in teasing out these issues and his skill as painter and draftsman.

-Chicago Tribune, Friday, February 28, 1992, David McCraken

A guide to Art Expo and Art Chicago
Just in time for the crush of international art fair visitors, the non-profit collective gallery Artemisia has pulled together one of their most solid group shows in quite some time. Two of the artist represented have been seen in one-person shows of note recently, and Artemisia affords a second chance to those who missed them the first time around. Margeauz Klein’s paintings and Cornell -like boxes and constructions filled Northern Illinois University gallery this winter; some of the same pieces are in the current show, as well as an installation that has as its core wall drawings from NIU, plus other pieces new to this viewer. The environmental theme Blane De St. Croix pursue with such rigor and skill in his show this year at Joy Horwich Gallery continues with his room-size installation at Artemisia. As in his earlier exhibition, he has erected a section of "library": scores of drawings deftly incised in black pigmented stucco on Masonite of endangered bird species, each fitted into a slot in a long container that traverses two walls near the ceiling. The drawings are accessed by rolling ladders, and a viewing table occupies the center of the room.

-Chicago Tribune, Friday, May 15, 1992, David McCraken

Perhaps because they’re rendered in rock, Blane De St. Croix’s pictures of endangered animals, currently hanging in the Locus Gallery, call to mind Paleolithic cave paintings. Like most icons of fleeting things, they seem to contain a kind of sacred vitality. The cave painting analogy only goes so far, though, because De St. Croix pictures are far from primitive. Rather, they possess considerable cunning of a contemporary nature. His technique involves spreading building-grades stucco all over his canvas or paper and toweling out the images with blunt instruments. To describe them you could borrow a phrase from the currently repopularized (but still dead) Doors singer, Jim Morrison: "Weird scenes inside the gold mine." The varnish and metal dust, as well as the lighting, conspire to make these pictures look as if they’re drawn on subterranean rock walls streaked with gold. But these are not weird scenes, They’re tragic ones. De St. Croix has devised a clever means of relating the scope of this disaster. On a piece of gold sizing adhered to a 10 - foot wooded board, he has listed, country by country, the names of every endangered bird in the world. Since birds are migratory, some names appear more than once. But the writing is very small, and you must climb a ladder or stoop down to read those listed at the column’s extremes. A rough count turns up around 1.800 entries. Even though the topical nature of Blane De St. Croix’s work is highly current, I can’t detect the slightest hint of exploitation in it. Rather, it seems utterly sincere. It is the work of an artist attempting to grapple with a form of global insanity. And it is -- especially the pictures – forceful, dynamic and quite beautiful.

-St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Art Reviews, Tuesday, April 2, 1991

Black Horn was a response to the continued waste and slaughter humankind wreaks upon this planed and its inhabitants. The piece consisted of an installation, a taped, musical accompaniment and for three evenings. Dance within the space. The collaborators used as the focus of their presentation the plight of the black rhinoceros. It is a prime candidate for extinction based solely on greed and stupidity. Artist Blane De St. Croix designed an enclosure that was installed in rear gallery of the Forum. The framework—built of wood, wire mesh and barbed wire -all but filled the space. A large sketch of a prone rhino without a horn dominated the rear wall of the pen. The floor was filled with dirt and peat on which about 40 horn-shaped objects were scattered. At times the execution of Patz’s choreography was sloppy, and the text was out of place and badly delivered. But these problems were balanced by the installation. Which successfully conveyed the dire straits of the animals, and the score’s juxtaposition of primitive sounds and its contemporary electronic format. With some judicious editing and tightening of focus. Black Horn could be a powerful, evocative and moving piece.

-High Performance, Fall 1990, Jeff Noonan