At Portsmouth exhibit, artists caution against environmental disaster

PORTSMOUTH

Air, water, land, species. Artists who feel the losses on all those fronts are exploding in number and spreading out like an oil spill.

In the 1960s, few artists made work that addressed environmental concerns. Some people, if they were even aware of these artists, saw them as preachy obsessives on the margins of society.

Now thousands of artists worldwide meld their ecological concerns with their aesthetic craftsmanship.

“It’s the canary in the coal mine,” said Gayle Paul, curator of Courthouse Galleries in Olde Towne Portsmouth. “They’re trying to raise awareness about these issues.”

Paul organized an exhibition, “Currents: Art and the Environment,” now at Courthouse Galleries, that brings together about a dozen artists from around the country, several with major reputations.

She was motivated to pull together the show last spring after the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “That was the tipping point for this as a topic,” Paul said. “It’s so relevant.”

Top artists include Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington; she created an elegant, mournful video that underlines how quickly rain forests are being cleared. “Ninety acres of rain forest are destroyed every minute,” the video claims, and “deforestation is responsible for 20 percent of all global-warming emissions.”

Artist Steven Siegel takes a longer view. He also shows in Lin’s gallery, a premiere New York art venue called The Pace Gallery.

Siegel’s works are about geological time. His imagining of what trash will do over eons to land and rocks inspires his sculptural objects.

“I don’t really believe in the word 'natural,’ because I believe we are the landscape,” Siegel told the international journal Sculpture last year, “not only by our physical presence, but also by the messes we leave and the way we reconfigure all of the material around us – from the roadway to the recycling of cans to nuclear waste.”

Fred Wilson is another Pace Gallery artist; his black, blown-glass teardrops appear to be dripping from the gallery wall. His piece deals with “complex social, economic and political issues of African oil production and export,” Paul wrote for a label.

Most of the works on display are enigmatic or instructive.

Three sculptures on display by Brent Crothers of Bel Air, Md., are beautifully crafted egg-shaped forms, about as tall as a person, made of either copper pipe, garden hoses or tire tread.

The tightly wound hose piece is called “Water Wars.” “The next century, wars will be fought over water,” Paul said.

Photographer Susannah Sayler and her collaborator, Edward Morris, show photos and explanatory text regarding their New York-based Canary Project, established in 2006 to document sites with damaged ecosystems.

The project’s title refers to the idiom “canary in the coal mine.” Canaries once warned coal miners of danger from toxic air.

Kim Abeles of Los Angeles is one such canary. She innovated smog as an art medium, setting objects on her rooftop for varying periods of time.

To make her “Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates” at Courthouse Galleries, she placed porcelain dishes stenciled with presidential portraits on the roof. Presidents with the worst environmental policies got the longest exposure to the smog, and therefore the dingiest faces.

Ronald Reagan’s face is the darkest. He blamed global warming on vegetation and said, “Let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards.”

Theodore Roosevelt’s is the lightest. He implored Americans to think ahead and avoid destruction and waste of natural resources.

In the late 1970s, when Abeles first exhibited her smog pieces, she was taunted. “They said I thought the sky was falling.” Those people were in denial about the smog, she said by phone this week.

“But I saw it, and it really upset me.”

Patrons who attended the opening reception last Friday were receptive to the messages.

“We try to recycle, and watch what we eat: where the food comes from, and whether or not it’s meat,” said Jonathan Brock, 26, of Portsmouth.

“We’re for renewable resources,” said his wife, Whitney Brock, 23.

They wondered about the meaning of Crothers’ “Synergy,” made from bits of copper pipe soldered together into a form resembling a leafless, ovoid thicket.

“That copper-egg thing,” Whitney Brock said of the piece, “we just redid a bathroom. We know how difficult that is” to solder lots of pipe sections.

“You can ride down the street, and people are throwing away little bits of piping all the time.”

According to the website www.bakerartistawards.com, Crothers’ piece was made with his own leftover bits from other projects. “There was too much history in these pipes” to toss them in a bin, he wrote.

Anne Iott of Norfolk, the show’s only local participant, also recycled materials. “That’s Sam Gilliam’s dropcloth,” Iott said at the reception. Gilliam is a well-known Washington, D.C., artist, and Iott had finagled a donation of throwaway canvas once used on his studio floor.

“You can see little bits of blue paint,” Iott said, indicating subtle swatches of deep aqua here and there on the 7½-foot-tall canvas. Her resulting work is tied to the wall like a deer hide, featuring a view of tree trunks that are sometimes indistinguishable from vertical strips in the background.

That’s key to the work’s meaning.

Called “Ambiguity,” her piece is about forest preservation in relation to northeast New York’s Adirondack Park, which the retired art educator has visited since she was a child.

“It’s sort of invisible, this problem with the forest,” Iott said, standing before her work. “And yet it’s right in front of it.

“We’re looking at it, and we’re not seeing.”

Paul feels the same way about the oil that is killing crabs, brittle stars and other bottom-dwelling creatures in the Gulf.

Scientists had hoped the oil would degrade more quickly than it is, reported The Huffington Post in February.

“The reality of it is, it’s still there,” Paul said of the oil.

“Nobody sees it anymore. But it’s still there.”

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com