Two earnest exhibitions about climate change have left me tepid.
It's a tough topic to tackle with nuance and thoughtfulness. Most people acknowledge that global warming poses a serious threat to the planet. Many have taken steps to reduce their carbon footprints. Art's responsibility must be to continue to inspire and awaken people to an issue that's already a regular topic of discussion.
This is where "Greed, Guilt and Grappling: Six Artists Respond to Climate Change," organized by longtime Boston artists Mags Harries and Clara Wainwright, falls short. In the show, Jay Critchley's video and photo installation "Global Yawning for a Small Planet," which features wall-size images of people yawning, inadvertently says it all. Wall text vaguely hints that yawning can actually have a salubrious effect on the climate. I googled "yawn" and "global warming" and rather than discovering that deep fatigue can help save the world, I found, in addition to Critchley's own video postings, countless sites with the essential message "Global warming. What a bore."
Much of "Greed, Guilt and Grappling" feels disingenuous or scolding. For "The Ecoshaman Walkabout Project," Wainwright, a quiltmaker, has stitched together several bright, lush cloaks and invites people to don them and go out on the street to engage passersby in discussions about the climate. It's a leap to ask a gallery-goer to become a street performer. For her sculpture "One Legged Table," Harries cut up 13 tables and used one leg and a chunk of tabletop from each to patch together this puzzle as an obvious metaphor for how we can all stand together if we support one another.
Lajos Héder has stamped black footprints up a gallery pillar and onto the ceiling, along with hectoring text such as "We pawn our carbon footprints off on industry, but the livelihood of many relies on jobs that feed consumer lifestyles." OK, we're consumers and we're bad. Tell us something we don't know.
Works like these just feel clumsy. John Tagiuri's "House Warming" is simpler: He has constructed two igloos, one, on the BCA plaza, from ice, and one inside from charred wood blocks. The outdoor igloo had almost completely melted when I visited the gallery. Tagiuri leaves connections about the arctic landscape and the winter temperature rising to the viewer's imagination. Michael Sheridan's video installation "Instant Noodles" deftly ties traffic, forest fires, the destruction of tropical rainforests, and the consumption of ramen noodles in a conceptual bow that is both disturbing and drolly funny.
Mills Gallery curator José Luis Blondet has mounted a corollary show, "Don't Need a Weather Man to Know Which Way the Wind Blows," featuring videos by Joanne Malinowska and Maura Jasper. Both invoke the climate in mood and sentiment without clapping you over the head with it. When art takes on social activism, a little subtlety goes a long way.
Second lives
"It's Getting Hot in Here," organized at the Montserrat Gallery at Montserrat College of Art by Leonie Bradbury and Shana Dumont, has a much narrower focus and comes across as conceptually thoughtful, rather than chiding. It's problematic in other ways. For one, three of the seven artists have shown very similar work in the Boston area quite recently. Given that the exhibition's theme is recycling, maybe they deserve a pass.
Or maybe not. All the artists make art out of trash. It's not a new theme; using old newspapers to make art goes back a century to early Cubist collage artists such as Georges Braque. But too much of this work feels the same, as if it's trash straining to be beautiful or meaningful: Ellen Driscoll's giant sculpture "Revenant," made from plastic bottles; Niizeki Hiromi's "Windows," a curtain made of the plastic windows from business envelopes; several works by Rachel Perry Welty, including "208,896 Loaves," a cylinder of strung-together bread tags; Yuken Teruya's "Forest Cloud," with exquisitely cut cardboard trees sprouting from toilet-paper rolls; and Pat Shannon's installations of newspapers with the content cut out.
Individually, each of these works has power. When grouped together, though, they read like a ridiculously accomplished selection of arts-and-crafts projects at an environmental summer camp.
Vaughn Bell's installation "Personal Landscapes: A Pack of Forests" and the artists collective People Powered crack the show open with broader recycling schemes. Bell has put little gardens in carts attached to leashes and offers them up for adoption, inviting viewers to tend to their local ecosystems the way they might care for a pet.
People Powered runs community-based recycling programs such as "Loop Limited: Recycled Paint," which includes take-home kits with labels, strainers, mixers, and rags. The newly mixed, newly canned old paint looks sleek stacked against a wall covered in a warm brown-gray tone mixed from paints the gallery collected in Beverly.
Despite too heavy a hand on the trashy aesthetic of artists who use recyclables, "It's Getting Hot in Here" pulls off what "Greed, Guilt and Grappling" strains to do, reminding us by example of how we can make changes, rather than preaching to the converted.
