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Nature As Muse and Mentor: Nine artists with N.C. connections share a theme in a major new show at the Green Hill Center in Greensboro
Photo Courtesy of Green Hill Center
Nancy Baker's City of God, oil on panel, is among the works in the exhibition titled "Regrowth."
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Published: August 10, 2008
GREENSBORO
The natural world has been a favored subject for artists in all parts of the world since the dawn of history. With each passing era, artistic approaches to natural themes have developed in ways that have paralleled societal and cultural changes.
Opportunities to see contemporary nature-theme art have been fairly common in recent exhibitions in the Piedmont Triad and elsewhere. To some extent the popularity of such themes among artists in this region reflects wild nature's imposing presence in large swaths of the South.
Regional artists' treatments of these themes are highlighted in "Regrowth," the latest big group show at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art. Organized by Edie Carpenter, the center's curator, the exhibition brings together works in several mediums by nine artists, who live in or at least have strong ties to the state. Plenty of other North Carolina artists have produced high-level work that would have fit comfortably within the show's curatorial parameters, but limiting the number to nine allows generous samplings of each artist's work to be shown.
Bryant Holsenbeck takes a resourcefully whimsical approach to the dichotomy between nature and industrial technology in her sculptural installation titled Wild. This simulation of a lush forest features -- among other imaginatively devised components -- exotic flowers, made of brightly spray-painted cut-up book pages, sprouting from vertically draped vines, which are actually garden hoses. The setting is enlivened by several crows, rabbits, a couple of foxes, and a few butterflies, all roughly life-size and painstakingly crafted from materials including plastic bags, rubber bands, pencil stubs and cut-up credit cards. Big, sketchy images of plant life on the surrounding walls look like hastily painted afterthoughts and, unfortunately, detract from the more elaborate overall effect.
More verisimilar in their sculptural representation of natural forms are the show's ceramic-glazed blown-glass pieces by Sally Rockriver, most of which bear an uncanny resemblance to cross-sectioned crystal-core geodes and related geological formations.
Ann Resnick celebrates kitschily artificial representations of nature in three sculptural pieces, including two -- Dasher Redux and Delta Two -- that take the form of big dogs. The dogs and the 8-by-6-foot freestanding wall relief Secret Garden are densely covered with fake plastic flowers in an array of loud colors. Secret Garden -- a highlight of the show -- also incorporates a soundtrack of electronically amplified bird calls, activated whenever a viewer stands at close range in front of the piece. Resnick is also represented by delicate, burnt-paper drawings, which incorporate cursive texts and stylized plant images, and a few large woodcuts, whose bright, pop-inflected flower images were inspired by the monumental flower paintings of Resnick's former teacher at UNC Greensboro, the late Bert Carpenter (the father of the center's curator).
Formally related to Resnick's works on paper are Kevin Mullins' wallpaper-like prints on canvas and paper, which feature Day-Glo colors and multiple layers of stylized flower imagery and related patterns that fill their surfaces from edge to edge.
Nancy Baker combines traditional illusionistic techniques and kitsch elements in her paintings Mad About You and City of God. Baker's paintings are dominated by nature-based imagery from sources including a Hudson River landscape painting and a paint-by-numbers kit. Her substantially larger, digitally printed piece, A Natural Selection, centers on a richly colored, 8-by-14-foot photo mural, whose appropriated imagery references paradise and warfare. The images include Edenic nude figures, skulls, exotic birds, tropical flowers, dripping fruits, armored Spanish conquistadors and modern military hardware, and they're juxtaposed collage-style against a luridly blue-tinged jungle landscape.
The lifelike birds in Baker's piece have their dead counterparts in bird specimens from a natural sciences museum, which are clinically presented on black backgrounds in a series of color photographs by Leah Sobsey. Also noteworthy is Sobsey's Xylocopa virginica, whose 400 sepia-hued, silver-dollar-size photograms of life-size bees are evenly distributed among and vertically distributed on 20 threads suspended from the ceiling. Presumably this piece is a comment on the recent decline in domestic honeybee populations -- an alarming trend that could symptomize larger ecological problems.
The centerpiece among Winston-Salem artist Faye Foster's three poetically evocative sculptural works in the show is Garden with Small Rock, a kind of slapdash shrine. This skeletal configuration of weathered lumber and driftwood centers on a black, jagged-edged rock, encased in a narrowly vertical wood box with twine partially wrapped around it -- an effective metaphor for existential perseverance in the face of loss and mortality.
Ann Marie Kennedy also references gardens in her compact, house-shaped piece titled Winter Garden, whose internal light source casts the shadows of otherwise unseen plant forms onto the structure's semi-transparent white silk walls. Suggestive of a small greenhouse, it's also a little too reminiscent of other internally illuminated, house-shaped sculptural installations I've seen in recent years.
■ "Regrowth" is on view through Aug. 24 at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, Greensboro Cultural Center, 200 N. Davie St. For more information, call 336-333-7460 or visit www.greenhillcenter.org.
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