Artists in three Minneapolis gallery shows celebrate Earth's vast and intimate wonders even as they fret about its future.
At Form + Content, more than a dozen Twin Cities talents ruminate about the state of the Earth in paintings, posters, photos and installations. Curator Camille J. Gage posed tough questions to spark what became their "Fierce Lament" on the subject.
"Is the end of life as we know it inevitable, or is there still time to mend our broken relationship with our Earth?" she asks. "As we face the slow destruction of the natural systems we rely on, how will we live?"
Expecting tidy answers to such vast and unwieldy topics would be way too much to ask of this slender show. Nevertheless, the artists provided a good deal to mull over in their dramatic and engaging display.
Sean Connaughty's "Arc of the Anthropocene" is the most provocative piece. Posing as a future anthropologist, Connaughty describes photos of carefully selected trash — toys, food wrappers, plastic water bottles — culled from 106 large bags of debris that he raked out of Lake Hiawatha in 2015. (Kudos for the cleanup work!)
His scholarly but antiseptic lingo is a clever mask for a devastating critique of the way now extinct "bipedal hominid endothermic amniotes" (i.e. humans) treated their environment. Despite "sufficient cranial capacity for intelligence" and evident concern for their young, this once-thriving life form was undone by malnourishment, aggressive capitalism, civil conflict and failure to develop the "empathetic capacity" necessary for species survival.
Presenting our collective follies so dispassionately effectively accentuates their dangers and lends gravitas to his photos of such otherwise mundane stuff as toy palm trees, a moldy pacifier and a tiny rusted truck.
Nearby, Lela Pierce has concocted a dense installation of twigs, seed pods, dried roots and grasses that she's woven into a visually arresting celebration of nature's fecundity. Andrea Carlson's dramatic, wall-sized painting of a barren, rocky inlet is framed by a porthole-like surrounding of jagged black-and-white lines, as if viewed by aliens from a distant galaxy. In a wall sculpture, Jonee Kulman Brigham links electrical switches to little photos of power plants and their varied sources of energy — nuclear, coal, gas, oil, trash.
