Cloud

Travis K. Schwab’s Cloud is a provocative work that finds beauty in ecological anxiety. The painting portrays a plastic balloon flying through the air. As the balloon is buffeted by winds, it beautifully reflects the cloudless sky and ground beneath it. A poignant image in the age of mass pollution, the balloon does more than reflect its surroundings by acting as a mirror to our own self-destructive consumerism. The inevitable refuse of a celebration, the balloon is ethereal and elegant, but also a harbinger of doom destined to suffocate some unsuspecting aquatic creature and further poison our oceans. Ironically it is the very mechanism that will end its own origin: the celebrations like the one it floated away from, and the natural world captured in its crinkled folds, are in grave danger by its very presence and the monumental accumulation of pollution it represents.

In Cloud, beauty and danger form an uneasy partnership.