Goodluckhavefun is celebrating its 20th exhibition with a presentation of artworks entitled Ethica Naturalis. This show shares its title with an emblem book published circa 1700. Emblem books were once popular, several centuries ago, typically combining beautifully woodcut or engraved prints alongside prose and poems.
In the same way that Aesop’s Fables used symbols from the natural world to convey certain moral messages, emblem books like the Ethica Naturalis also moralize and personify different natural forces. A comet in the sky is read as a warning of God’s wrath and punishment. The sun inspires love and warmth. The moon blushes with embarrassment, because its dim light encourages mischief makers to misbehave. At other times, the emblematic connections between text and image were complex and poetic, testing the reader’s ability to comprehend the moral being imparted.
Ethica Naturalis, the exhibition, brings together the work of four artists: Eli Decker, Ario Elami, Christopher Miller, and Teppla. Each artist makes work featuring a combination of natural elements: sun, clouds, water, stone. The artwork in this exhibit asks viewers to interpret each possible moral or lesson. Is there a warning present in Elami’s drawings of long abandoned, overgrown structures carved from stone? Miller and Teppla both paint with joyful, colorful abandon: is it a pure celebration of warmth and sunlight, or something else? Are Decker’s eerie and uncanny environments a nightmare, a premonition, or both?
Ethica Naturalis asks the viewer to reflect on their environment; to recall moments in the sun, in the woods, by the ocean, or soaking in a natural spring. By making this work, each artist considers whether acts of nature are random and incoherent, or if there is a special significance to these events. Ultimately, Ethica Naturalis can be read as a reflection on the power we exert over our environment, and a recognition of how often the natural world takes that power back.
Eli Decker (b. 1998) is a painter living in Austin, TX. He earned his BA in Studio Art and Computer Science from Colby College. Decker's paintings evoke a dreamlike atmosphere, capturing the surreal dimensions of modern isolation. Through subtle gestures, Decker explores the pervasive influence of technology on our perception of reality, blending organic forms with artificial elements to reflect on solitude and the fleeting nature of beauty. Decker has shown work at Co-Lab Projects, McLennon Pen Co., Austin Studio Tour, and Austin Bouldering Project.
Christopher Miller is a painter based in Austin, TX. After graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2018 with a BFA in painting, Christopher relocated his practice to Austin where he currently lives and works. His paintings are visual translations of the landscape that utilize strong, saturated colors as elements of tension and expression within the work. His work has been shown at the Kansas City H&R Block Art Space, the Leedy-Volkous Art Center, and Cloudtree Gallery and Studios.
Teppla is an Austin, TX based oil painter specializing in portraying luminosity on canvas. Starting with charcoal in his youth, contrast of opposites has always appealed to him. Today with his oil paintings, he explores the vivid intensities that color can achieve. Cloudscapes are his way of practicing what he's learned from observing light. Their dynamic form and texture provide a fertile ground to generate ideas, and their ambiguity allows the viewer to infuse their own meaning of the clouds.
Ario Elami is a Hudson, New York-based artist, graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts’ graduate program through Tufts University, and a composer and author besides. Elami claims dual citizenship as both an Iranian and North American, and has spent his life growing among the east coast and midwest.
Elami's art mainly explores architecture as visceral and botanical analogy; and the tension between human design and nature on the verge of reclaiming its birthright. This work has developed in tandem with an understanding of the earliest architecture as numinous altars, upon which were laid sacrificial items such as teeth, eggs, skulls, and vertebrae; and a perception of nature as a roiling mass of aggressive life, perpetuating itself through overabundance. In this sense, architecture manifested out of spiritual violence, and was a site for the inner to become externalized.
