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At The Warehouse: The End of Nature

April 12, 2008

crayola flowers by Herb williams

The End of Nature is a terrrific group show that opened last night at the Warehouse (more about that beloved and endangered institution and its first family, the Rupperts, later) Inspired, I assume, by Bill McKibben's book of the same name, the participating artists consider what a globally degraded and overheated future holds. The thirty or so artists come at the subject from very different angles; some, like Herb Williams, who fashioned flowers from crayolas, even find a lightly humorous take. Perhaps surprisingly, the show mostly succeeds in avoiding the scream-in-your-face style in favor of the more subtle, which is far more difficult to bring off. Most of the work is aesthetically engaging as well as thematically.

Monkey Paws by Jonathan Prull

Renee Shaw's jars

There is a lot of good work here; I'm not sure who did the curating, but he/she/they deserve much credit. I loved Jonathan Prull's monkey paws and Lynda Byrne's plastic nests.The piece I find myself most thinking about this morning is Renee Shaw's front window full of jars of pickled life. Each one contains a beautiful, frightening, slightly stomach-turning collection of what looks like bits of things once alive floating in vegetable oil, which imparts a luminosity and reflective quality that enhances the effect. It's like the window of a crazed Chinese herbalist.

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