Cosmic Pond. Photo courtesy of the artist.
A fuzzy ring of bright green moss surrounds a screen showing images from NASA’s Hubble space telescope, transporting viewers to outer space. The display flickers from cosmic constellations to black-and-white depictions of stars. You can’t touch the mossy border, but water droplets on the screen’s surface hint that Cosmic Pond is partially alive. The moss is watered by the artist, Maria Markham.
The dissonance between the earthiness of the moss and the vastness of the universe, the living plant and the faraway dispatches, sparks a conversation about our planet and its place within the broader universe—about what is within our reach and what is beyond our control. The two-person show Altered Landscapes, on view at City Gallery through December 28, explores the theme of climate change with installations by Markham accompanied by her friend Sue Rollins’s paintings.
Inventive and attractive, Cosmic Pond is visible from the gallery’s front window, and it introduces a framing convention that continues in Rollins’s paintings. Before/After I: The View—the first painting in the artist’s current series—sets up comparisons between conventional, bucolic landscapes scenes and the gray environments surrounding them. The murky backdrops illustrate “what could or will be if we don’t act,” according to the wall text.
In the aforementioned example, fluffy cumulus clouds dominate a rectangle in the lower left corner of the otherwise gloomy composition. Agitated burnt orange brush strokes hover over muted purples and greens in the painting’s background. This dusky and dark area is meant to represent anthropogenic changes in our world.
In other paintings, Rollins employs birds to signal the harmful ways that humans are impacting the environment. One beady black eye peers out of the small head of a yellow bird in The Sign. The bird appears against a bright ultramarine sky, nested squarely within a wild spray of foliage. The label for this painting has a QR code that links to an article titled “Seven Simple Actions to Help Birds.” (Spoiler: making paintings about birds is not on this list.)
Jacquelyn Gleisner Photo.
This work, as with others by Rollins, has an immediate reading that prompts viewers to probe the formal qualities of her paintings. In Before/After II, for instance, Rollins is more confident with her expressive mark-making. She layers her brushstrokes and paint slashes with vigor, and viewers can sense this authentic dynamism.
While the message of paintings like The Sign is a smidge too straightforward, there’s more to unpack with a sculptural work, floating in the back corner of the gallery. In Erosion, Markham has aligned a series of photographic images printed on clear film. All ten prints reproduce the same image: a deep depression in a dry, dirt path. In the foreground, the earth sinks ominously into the ground below patches of green grass. “While erosion is a natural phenomenon, this encounter served as a stark reminder of the broader challenges we face,” writes Markham on her website.
The prints hang from a gnarled stick, individually tied with clear fishing line, each varying in transparency: the first print is fully saturated, while the subsequent images lose their vibrancy. The gradual fade of these prints presents a clever parallel to the incremental changes in global temperature levels or the slow rise of sea levels.
Jacquelyn Gleisner Photo.
In the center of the gallery, another multimedia installation by Markham grapples with a different issue associated with climate change: the decline of biodiversity. Altered Futures features an unlikely spray of plants such as evergreens, lichen, cacti, and succulents.
She has arranged these plants—which would not naturally grow nearby each other—within a woven aluminum raft that rests on a bed of dirt. Not too far below the surface is a metaphor for living things thriving in spite of a seemingly barren ground. Still, we should be weary of taking too much comfort in the resilience of the natural world.
Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is “polarization,” and the concept of extremes has clear ties to the climate crisis. For some, raging wildfires or rising sea tides are nothing of note. Yet for others, the existential threat of global warming is so oppressive and all-consuming that an artist’s reflection on this matter can quickly feel superficial and inadequate, particularly if unmatched by other actions—like choosing sustainably sourced materials or avoiding toxic paints and solvents.
Far from fanatical, Altered Landscapes starts to scratch the surface and hopes to inspire others to take action. There are moments of surprise to unsettle what is—to some, at least—an obvious concern for our imperiled earth.
Altered Landscapes continues through Dec. 28 of this year at City Gallery, 994 State St. in New Haven.