Climate of Uncertainty

DePaul Art Museum, Chicago

Through March 24

Almost no human figures appear among the photos, prints, and installations in this engaging group show, said Franck Mercurio in Time Out Chicago. Human influence, on the other hand, is everywhere. The works, created by 12 artists, address environmental destruction on scales both large and small. Some works are so “achingly beautiful” that they belie the ugly information they convey. Terry Evans created the photography series “A Greenland Glacier”during an expedition with scientists who were measuring ice-sheet shrinkage, but what you’ll remember of her Arctic landscapes are their colors—grays and whites “accentuated by seductive blues.” Likewise, Sonja Hinrichsen’s massive video projections in The Three Gorges, 3rd Edition “lull viewers with travelogue-like scenes of China’s Yangtze River Valley.” The wall text, explaining that these waterscapes are by-products of a dam that has befouled the river, brings us back to reality.

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“If anything, the exhibition is too tame,” said Kyle MacMillan in the Chicago Sun-Times. While it’s gratifyingly free of heavy-handed polemic, “what’s missing is the artistic equivalent of a smoking gun, a work that makes its point with dagger-like directness.” Montreal sculptor Maskull Lasserre comes closest with Murder (2012), a group of 19 wood crows. Each bird is “charred black, casting a pall over this otherwise innocuous scene and transforming these creatures into harbingers of an impending ecological calamity.” The piece invokes Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows, a painting that many consider a portent of the artist’s imminent suicide. Through these birds, reduced to carbon husks, Lasserre chillingly suggests suicide writ large.