Hawley arranges Biophilia in a chromatic sequence, interweaving vibrant artworks with ones of earthen ochres. While this pulsing effect creates a biorhythm across the long room, the careful orchestrations evoke a well tended garden more than a vast forest. Take the row of four paintings from Heide Follin, each one paired with a botanical ceramic of Julie Evans on a pedestal below. The gestural floral panels, and the faithful sculptures unite in an uncannily matched color scheme, a staged biomimicry of sorts.
Like Follin, Christina Massey uses a bright palette, but to a troubling effect. Her large wall sculptures are made of cut craft beer cans; they look like dense hedges of shrapnel shrubbery. Their sharp edges gleam in silver and eye-popping colors, attracting my gaze with a dangerous invitation, like the most beautiful and poisonous plants. While the wall sculptures cannot overcome their commercial aesthetic, they manage to expose a sinister mix of alcohol, litter, and consumerism.
More subtle are the vines that Massey makes from the cans’ tops. They snake Suessianly around the ceiling and blossom into hand blown glass bulbs. Their sinuous form mingles nicely with the wooden sculptures of Loren Eiferman, who fuses bits of branches to create large scale flora. These assertive works look like both bone and tendon. In pieces like the four foot tall 14v, Eiferman lets the raw wood gleam, exposing her process’s cannibalistic life cycle—the gathering of dead material to create new forms of life. Her material lists include the number of wooden pieces that make each whole, suggesting a methodical reverence to her subjects.
Carol Bouyoucos takes similar meticulous care in her digitally composed collages. The most effective are The Road Home and Sanctuary: panoramic landscapes, layered with plant specimen photographs, and painterly brush stroke effects. Within the exhibition’s bubbly palette, Bouyoucos’s use of Romanticism’s brooding, majestic light channels nature’s deep, unknown power. By printing these digital images onto metal, the artist places such mysteries within a contemporary framework.
Biophilia reaches its most Bjorkian with sculptor Sui Park’s colorful webbed mounds populating the show’s far end. These works look like enlarged cellular networks grown into otherworldly cacti, cora, or cocoons grown to the size of a toddler. Upon close examination, I realized that they’re made of zip-ties! There’s a note of hope in using these plastics to create new forms of playful life.
Park’s work ties (no pun intended) into the well appointed to well appointed craft corner, at the gallery entrance. There, kids of any age can make a zip tie sculpture of their own, or use the old classics of markers and construction paper. Families are an important audience for this show. At the start of another silent spring, I’m glad that people across generations can see our place within the organic cycles of inspiration and creation. It’s easy to imagine visitors leaving the show for a walk in the woods. And it’s not wishful thinking to hope that they’ll pick up some litter, and a creative spark on the trail.