Disasters Deconstructed

What does an extinct frog sound like?

If you turn up the volume on Tracy Hicks’ “Canaries/Frogs/Silence”
at the Tucson Museum of Art, you’ll find out: it croaks and squeaks and
trills. A chorus of the voices of lost frog species—”the sounds
of frogs that no longer exist,” as curator Julie Sasse put it—is
the haunting soundtrack for Hicks’ mixed-media installation.

Texas artist Hicks assembled “Canaries” specifically for Sasse’s big
show Trouble in Paradise: Examining Discord Between Nature and
Society. Re-creating a piece of a work he exhibited in Dallas last
year, the artist converted a whole wall of the museum into a simulated
ecology lab. Shelves are jumbled with test tubes lit by colored lights
and glass jars filled with silicon casts of endangered frogs. The frog
replicas float inside the glass, appearing as dead as the frog cousins
whose croaking resounds through the air.

Hicks isn’t just an artist with a frog fixation. He breeds
endangered frogs and toads at home, and he’s gone to South America with
herpetologists on a frog-research expedition.

The artist inscribed some of his data on the museum wall in pencil.
A chart divided by years shows the small number of frog species that
disappeared in the years between Linnaeus and Darwin, with short
scattered lines indicating intermittent loses. But the number escalates
rapidly following Darwin, and the small lines give way to thickly
clotted slashes signifying catastrophic species death.

Like the proverbial canary in the mine, the disappearing frogs are
signal species, raising alarms about climate change and habitat
destruction. Sasse’s show, a major undertaking seven years in the
making, takes a look at environmental catastrophe through the prism of
art. Photography makes the strongest showing, but multiple media are
represented, including the traditional arts of painting and drawing, as
well as up-to-the minute videography and installation. Frying pans even
debut as a poignant art medium.

At least three pieces, including Sue Coe’s graphite drawing “We Are
All in the Same Boat,” rework Gericault’s 1819 shipwreck painting “The
Raft of the Medusa” as an image of impending doom.

“At first, I was looking at death as part of the lifecycle,” Sasse
said, “but then all these natural disasters occurred: the tsunami,
Hurricane Katrina, global warming. This stuff was too powerful to leave
out.”

So the show shifted. For sure, its 60 artworks by 57 artists from
eight countries seemingly include every possible natural disaster, from
floods and tornadoes to lightning storms and tidal waves. Daredevil
Tucson lightning chaser Jeff Smith shows a dazzling 2003 photo, “Red
Rock Power Station, Arizona.” A jagged white bolt flashes against a
violet sky and darts down between power towers etched in black. In
Susan Shatter’s 1992 “Volcano,” an egg tempera painting on wood, fiery
orange lava spews skyward. Anthony Pessler conjures a terrifying
tornado on the prairie in black and white in “Sturm und Drang,” a 2008
graphite drawing.

Scary as these eruptions are, Sasse argues through her exhibition
that the greatest natural disasters arise out of human cupidity and
stupidity. Most of the artists, like Hicks, are looking at problems
caused by homo sapiens. Destroy your rain forest, and you kill
your frogs. Slice off the prairie grasses, and you get the Dust Bowl.
Burn fossil fuels, and you push up global temperatures and melt the
icepacks. Fill in the wetlands of the Mississippi, and the waters of
Hurricane Katrina have no place to go but the Ninth Ward.

Several arresting works capture the human catastrophe of Katrina.
Renowned photographer Robert Polidori shot a desolate New Orleans
bedroom. Once sumptuous, “6328 North Miro Street,” 2005, is covered in
fine gray mold and debris. The empty bed is collapsed. Mitch Epstein
caught a mattress in a dead tree in “Biloxi, Mississippi,” 2005.

Luis Cruz Azaceta, a Cuban transplanted to New Orleans, combined the
homely belongings of the exiles with pictures in “At the Bottom of the
Pot,” 2007. He roamed his adopted city after the flood, collecting pots
and pans that had floated away from kitchens. He hung 40 of the pots in
a grid on the museum walls, and glued onto the back of each one a photo
of a flood victim—screaming, crying or dead.

Global warming and the decline of the polar bear get a
humorous—sort of—treatment from Irish artist Nevan Lahart.
“Ch. 91: The Sun Sets on Santa’s North Pole Operation,” 2007, is an oil
and acrylic painting in Arctic black and white, crudely framed by wood
tricked up to look like an old-style TV. Poor Santa has lost his
habitat, and he’s already dead, lying in a polar bear’s lap like Jesus
in the Pietà. The painting is racy and weird—Santa
is naked and bleeding—and the presence of the TV suggests the
role of the media in sensationalizing and trivializing. If it bleeds,
it leads. Maybe a dead Santa is the only way to get climate change on
the nightly news.

Mikhael Subotzky, a 28-year-old Magnum photog from South Africa,
also draws on art history, beautifully, in his “Beaufort West,” a
large-format color photo from 2006. Trash pickers in a rubbish dump
bend over plastic bags and food cups and cheap toys, curving their
backs every bit as gracefully as “The Gleaners” picking up stray wheat
in the 1857 Jean-François Millet painting. At least the grains
the Frenchwomen were scavenging were healthful foods. The South
Africans are scrounging through consumer trash, which extends across
the landscape as far as the eye can see. But the artists in both cases
sanctify the wretched of the Earth in their artworks: The desperate
searchers are bathed in a heavenly light.

An angelic image by Australian Rosemary Laing of a flying woman,
“weather #4,” 2006, suggests a less-than-celestial event. Laing has
photographed a doll in a white dress tumbling down out of the sky,
surrounded by scraps of paper from newsmagazines. It suggests the
falling bodies of Sept. 11. The piece strays a little from the theme,
perhaps, since Sept. 11 was not (at first) an environmental disaster,
but it is simply too powerful to be left out.

Closer to home, Tempe video artist Dan Collins, an Arizona State
University professor, has conjured up Phoenix under water in the video
installation “Flood,” 2008-2009. Digital animation depicts Phoenix
reincarnated as a sea, with its familiar mountains rising up fetchingly
above the shining waters. Photos picture assorted alluring color shots
of the watery city, with the tops of skyscrapers peeking above the
waters. The piece is apparently intended as a serious look at possible
flooding, but it’s so inventive that it’s just plain fun.

Heather Green of Tucson created another installation, hers taking a
critical look at the Sea of Cortez, where overfishing by factory ships
has caused a decline in fish populations and where overdevelopment is
eroding the coastline. “Tide Cycle—An Act Against Erasure”
appeared in the MFA show at the UA last year. (More power to Sasse for
including an up-and-coming young artist alongside big names from around
the world.)

The energetic Green uses every medium in her mix to drive home the
point that you can’t tamper with nature without consequences. Wonderful
little oil paintings depict a red chair being carried out to sea by the
relentless tides. Old-fashioned metal linotype “slugs” piled on
pedestals below spell out the erosion problems and water shortages
caused by all those condos going up in Puerto Peñasco. Tiny
photos documenting the coming and going of the tides are arranged
sequentially on giant viewfinders. You turn the crank to see the
24-hour cycle, with the waters shifting fetchingly by the light of the
sun and the moon.

Her “Tide Cycle” is both an homage to the seaside paradise and a
warning that it may already be a paradise lost.

This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2009.