See “Eden after the fall, the dark side of the garden” at Clark

By Leon Nigrosh

 
January 2006 –

Under the rubric “Unnatural Order,” Clark University Associate Professor Elli Crocker has assembled the works of five artists (herself included) who employ elements of nature in their motifs. Crocker is showing three life-sized mixed media drawings that are richly colored and infused with complex elements of style and imagery. Her “Dancing Shiva” seems a contemporary male figure that is busy stomping what appears to be an angry dog, one that just so happens to have four arms. “Artemis” is a full figured woman ~ with 10 breasts. But it’s Crocker’s “Hamadryad,” a nude female peeking out from a field of leaves, that is the simplest and most striking image.

Anne Sargent Walker presents us with 13 small wooden panels consisting mostly of sections of old wallpaper played off against painted images of animals and birds with the occasional human thrown in for contrast. Her “Seaside Garden” has floating birdhouses and flowery wallpaper set against a plaid sky. A well-rendered singing bird on a vine appears in several of her compositions, but in a change of pace work, line drawings of carpentry tools float across a BDU camouflage background.

At first, the paintings by Gail Boyajian appear to mimic the old masters that marveled at nature and represented it as accurately as possible. The execution of her birds and insects rival the meticulous brushwork of Audubon, but there the comparison ends. On careful study, each of her paintings has something anachronistic within it. Most striking is her 5-foot long narrow panel, “Birds’ Eye View,” which shows a number of beautifully painted birds that are apparently startled by the noise of military choppers cutting their way through the cotton candy clouds.

Karen Moss has taken a different approach for expressing her feelings about the connection ~ or disconnection ~ between nature and humanity. Since 2001, she has been using bits of shredded consumer mail-order catalogs to create her wall works and freestanding sculptures. In “Full Cycle” she uses myriad pieces of brightly colored paper to create three ten-foot tall trees, barren of leaves, as mute commentary about the fact that humans chop down living things to make wasteful brochures about stuff we probably don’t need anyway.

But it’s Randal Thurston’s artwork that takes the cake for sheer size and eye-popping interest. His ten-foot tall by 18-foot long wall of bug silhouettes is a stunner. Hundreds of small to large black cut-out images of just plain and fancy bugs populating a stark white wall is a show-stopper. Even his two-foot diameter silhouette bug mandalas pale in comparison to this powerful installation. Some bugs are plastered directly to the wall while others hover slightly above it. And it’s these insects that are the scariest. Thurston has magically given these images the ability to glow pastel greens, pinks, and other colors from beneath their crusty shells, creating what appears to be a moving wall of creepy-crawlers that both stimulates and horrifies at the same time.

According to Crocker this exhibition is an expression of “Eden after the fall, the dark side of the garden.” Check out the show and then decide for yourself.