Art and science at the Urban Ecology Center

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Visual Reflections: A Printmaker Collective

“The challenge is immense.” The phrase lingers in my mind as I slowly circumnavigate the room, reading stories of environmental restoration and seeing artists’ representations of those stories. The “challenge” refers to what artist Douglas Bosley offers as a “call to arms.” Bosley teamed up with Kingsley Dixon, an ecologist in Australia, via the twenty-first century technology of Skype. In an exhibit label the artist outlined the specific challenge:

“For two decades, a million acres of western Australian land were cleared per year. Kingsley Dixon’s mission is to restore a million of those acres…. The challenge is immense. The land is essentially wasteland. …Nevertheless, Dixon’s group and many others are building the science and the solutions to make this dream possible.”

Bosley’s lithograph of ghostly flowers and a monumental “1M” rising from a barren landscape attempts to express that million acre challenge.

For Yvette Pino, founder of Bench Press Events and organizer of this project, the challenge was to bring together fine artists and ecologists like Bosley and Dixon to stimulate dialogue and collaboration. The success of her effort is displayed along the gallery walls.

The challenge for Bosley, as for each of the 12 artists in the project, was to create an image inspired by conversations and, in some cases, interactions with the collaborating ecologist.

The prosaic title of the exhibit, “Visual Reflections: A Printmaker Collective,” doesn’t begin to describe the complexity of the project that led to these prints hanging on the gallery walls. The theme of ecology is expressed directly in the premise of the project. Pino invited twelve fine art printmakers from around the U.S. to collaborate with twelve ecologists from as far away as Australia and China.

An untitled woodcut by Colorado artist Kim Hindman superimposes terrestrial and aquatic life forms on a map of New York harbor. The spatially ambiguous composition emphasizes the ragged edges of the famous estuary. A text panel identifies restoration of seawalls and the water’s edge as the specialty of ecologist Dr. Marcha Johnson, Hindman’s collaborator.

The colorful, boldly abstract patterning in “Return, Take Over,” a serigraph by Wisconsin artist Katie Garth, might be mistaken as merely decorative. But the conceptual rigor in the work as well as the interdependence of printmaker and ecologist are hinted at in the accompanying narrative. In the artist’s words, “John [Reiger] explained several restoration strategies… each using varying levels of intervention. Mentally, I juxtaposed the initial disturbance…with its subsequent restoration. Both altered the landscape, but with opposite intentions…. ‘Return, Take Over’ depicts the cohabitation of growth and decay in order to represent this duality in human disruption.”

A densely detailed and somber mezzotint of a subtly surreal scene hangs in a far corner of the gallery. Leaves sprout from oddly geometric rocks. Fantastical creatures seemingly made from splinters of wood and stone march like crustaceans—or scorpions—through a hard, crystalline landscape. The mood is dark, foreboding. The title, “LD.4334.1409,” which may refer to scientific enumeration, adds obfuscation to mystery.

The ominous mood comes as a surprise after viewing the rest of the exhibit. While diverse in other ways, the overall tone of the show is bright, upbeat. This is perhaps the greater surprise. Sunny optimism is not necessarily to be expected in an art exhibit about ecology in a time when climate change seems to be trending inexorably towards climate chaos. But while the haunting mezzotint with the enigmatic title may be more consistent with such a vision, don’t come to this exhibit looking for stereotypes.

In fact, don’t go looking for this exhibit in a traditional art gallery. The challenge for the uninitiated is to locate the exhibition space. The flagship branch of the Urban Ecology Center at Riverside Park has had arts programming as one of its missions since its inception. The lower level Community Room of the Center was designed with art exhibitions in mind. The austere white cube of traditional gallery spaces, however, is another stereotype to dismiss here. Viewing the art may involve maneuvering around a room set up for the educational games that regularly bring hundreds of schoolchildren to the center to learn about the natural world.

That those children may enjoy seeing on the walls serious art geared for an adult audience is not a bonus. It’s a deliberate strategy to establish interconnecting experiences. Ecology and a culture of scientific inquiry pervade everything the center does. The positive tone of this exhibit may be a consequence of that kind of sensibility.

Optimism also may be a motivating attitude for the ecologists. All specialize in the forward-thinking field of environmental restoration. The impetus for the project was the 2013 World Conference of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), which was held in Madison, WI. All of the ecologists chosen for the project are SER members and the prints were first displayed last year at the Conference in Madison.

Several of the artists went beyond the use of imagery to express ecological principles in their work. For example, artist Heather Buechler teamed up with ecologist Debbie Mauer, who both reside in Illinois. After hiking together in prairie preserves and discussing the balance of nature, they harvested big bluestem and panic grass from one of the sites. Their collaboration continued into the studio where they processed the grasses into handmade paper pulp “to create a paper that is tied to the place that inspired it.” The image Buechler printed on the handmade paper, entitled “Diversity in Small Parcels,” is a complex layering of grass stems, the watershed of the Illinois River, and a silhouette of Lake Michigan.

Several of the prints were even framed in unfinished wood recovered from discarded industrial palettes. The recycling effort is intended to resonate with scientific methodologies; it also takes the concept of the cycle of nature beyond metaphor.

“Visual Reflections: A Printmaker Collective,” is on display through June. The Urban Ecology Center is located at 1500 East Park Place, next to Riverside Park. Hours are on its website.

One final challenge: if you arrive at this unique gallery when no one else is there you may have to grope along the wall to find the light switch. At the Urban Ecology Center no energy is wasted. Creative energy, however, is continually being generated.

An edited version of this review first appeared in Art City.

Science, Poetry, and the Photographic Image

I just returned from Atlanta where I attended the annual conference of the Society of Photographic Educators (SPE). You can certainly be excused if you're not familiar with SPE (unless you're a photo educator!) I don't attend the conference every year, but it is a good way to feel the pulse of photography as it's being passed on to a new generation. I thought I'd share some of my experiences.

Room-sized, camera-less pinhole image by
keynote speaker Abelardo Morell (see below)

The theme of the conference was Science, Poetry, and the Photographic Image. Although any conference of photographers will be awash in photographic imagery, I saw scant evidence of serious science and less of poetry. I'll come back to the science in a moment. As a fan and occasional writer of poetry I was especially looking forward to seeing how these disciplines might be integrated creatively. But I was disappointed when two featured speakers gave it no more than an obligatory, almost dismissive nod. The third didn't even bother to nod in its direction.

An exception was Bea Nettles, who has been combining her mother's poetry with her own photographic images since 1972. That personal and loving collaboration has taken the form of a series of books that Nettles created using a variety of available technologies. Her presentation traced a history of those technologies, from a loose leaf binder full of collages paired with typewritten pages of poems through years of typesetting and offset lithography to her most recent foray into the new world of digital image-making and print-on-demand online publication. Her visuals showed how each new phase brought greater fluidity to the relationship between text and image and also resonated with my own bookmaking and publishing efforts, which have had a similar trajectory. (Her mother's poetry was quite good, too!)

Back to science. One of the featured speakers was Catherine Wagner, a highly decorated photography veteran with a long list of fellowships, awards, and exhibitions in major art museums. With no fixed style - she has a chameleon's sensitivity to her subject's context - nearly all of her work oozes with science. Her image above is a series of MRI scans of a pumpkin. Lest it seem boringly repetitive I suggest you check out this link to her website to see a similar series of scans of a pomegranate in a 40 ft. long museum installation. Wagner admitted that many of her scientific subjects can be intimidating for the average audience. Her solution is to "use beauty as a formal strategy for observation." In other words, whether or not you find the "typologies of scientific processes" fascinating you will suspend your reluctance to view them because of the exquisite beauty of the photographic images.

They are indeed beautiful. If I had to criticize her work, I would argue that its formal qualities may be too facile and her approach to her subjects too neutral. She appears to keep any potential for scientific controversy at the arm's length formal abstraction provides. The image below is from a series she calls Frankenstein in an overt reference to Mary Shelley's fictional character. Wagner likens these foil wrapped vacuum chambers, which are used for "experiments in high energy physics and synchrotron radiation research," to Shelley's Frankenstein. However, she misses an opportunity to relate her imagery to the darker implications of the impulse to create such "monsters" that is so much at the heart of Shelley's masterpiece.

The work that appealed to me the most was that of keynote speaker, Abelardo Morell. Although I've seen some of his decades-long experiments with the camera obscura before, I was not familiar with his name. If that is true for you, too, I am delighted to introduce him. The idea of a camera obscura (which means "dark chamber") predates the Italian Renaissance which gave it the name. A camera obscura is a device, usually a box, into which light is admitted through a pinhole in one side. An image of the scene in front of this device is projected onto its back surface. Renaissance artists used such a device to make accurate depictions of perspectival space and it is the distant precursor to the photographic camera. To make a long story short, Morell uses an entire room as a camera obscura, making a pinhole in a blackened window. He then photographs the image that is projected (upside down and backwards) onto the rear wall of the room - spilling across doorways and furniture, etc. The resulting photographs are simultaneously lovely and disorientingly surreal.

Out of what was overall a good conference, there was one bittersweet element. One of the highlights of every SPE conference is the opportunities that are available to visit local museums and galleries. Atlanta is home to one of my favorite museums, the High Museum of Art. Unfortunately, the major current photographic exhibition was the Cartier-Bresson retrospective that I'd already seen at the Art Institute of Chicago. Ah, but..., I thought, they also have an exhibit of Toulouse-Lautrec! I adore his work. My hopes were dashed, however, by the perceived borders of art that I find so limiting. The High graciously opened its doors after hours on Saturday night for a special viewing by SPE members...of the Cartier-Bresson show only - not the Toulouse-Lautrec show. All in all, however, Cartier-Bresson, arguably the most important, influential, and ubiquitous photographer of the Twentieth Century, is worth a second (third, fourth...) viewing. Familiar as the work is, it's especially instructive to see the less famous pieces.

Shanghai, 1948

His eye is unerring, able to capture a multitude at the exact instant when everyone in the crowd has an expression worth studying. I’ve made innumerable students memorize his immortal phrase, “the decisive moment.”

The exhibit wisely, I think, shows his work in different states, and with varying print quality. His images were made for publication in magazines and therefore he didn’t do his own printing for most of his long career. The “fine print” made with the luscious gradations of black and white silver gelatin that one learns to expect at a museum of this caliber has little meaning in this context. It was great to see the luscious ones alongside those of less discriminating quality. I overheard a photo teacher commenting on the low grade that a student would receive if a print of such poor quality made it out of their darkroom!

To view my photo essay from my visit to Atlanta, go to Images of Atlanta.