Climate change, pollution, disappearing bees, frogs, and the continuing dissolution of the ozone layer

Josef Bejus: Scream Or We Are On The Same Boat

Art Dialogue Gallery is a longstanding community asset. Prominently visible at the confluence of Franklin, Linwood, and North streets, its location is often only glimpsed in passing one of three directions on the circuitous routes to destinations citywide.

Once inside, a visitor will find the gallery is more than ample for comprehensive exhibitions, with spacious rooms and excellent lighting. Supported by members dues, friends of the gallery and a prosperous framing business, Art Dialogue Gallery has lasted longer than any other private gallery in the city.

The current show, “Think Green,” is a members-only, non-juried theme exhibit with the obvious intention to put before the public a very timely topic for which many artists have great concern. More to the point, the work at hand reflects a largely nonjudgemental, largely neutral display of relevant concerns for the stewardship of mother earth. After better than 30 years of beating the drum for the environment, most artistic product, especially landscape art, still proffers scenes that any pluto-techno, land-raping, global imperialist running dog would be proud to hang over his or her leather couch. The creative efforts in this exhibition in the main go to pristine visions of bucolic, unpeopled spaces, in middle-distanced scenes wonderfully controlled, finely crafted, excellently colored, and seemingly perpetually well-tended in a calendar of verdancy.

This is not to say there are no pertinent, interesting works in this assortment. Josef Bejus’s cut-paper piece, like a section of sod, with paper blades of grass (or just blades?) juts from the wall, an aggressive prominence. Don Schueller’s photo-montage with text is a personal apologia to future generations. Others stand out, too: Joan Fitzgerald’s panoply of deer scratched out in red and black; photographer Len Kagelmacher’s bright flower portraits, Gerald Mead’s fiduciary comment on commerce and utility; and Dana Hatchett’s small oil of a wooded clearing with the tell-tale tire ruts of heavy earthmoving equipment.

Andrew Wyeth’s recent passing at 91 brings to mind an example of an artist whose work was imbued with both humanity and a sense of a real place, both beautiful and brutally true to life. His work had within its often gaunt perimeters the weight of the world sketched in the limning of a single out-building.

Concerned artists, especially in this morally and ethically recidivist region of the country, need to move beyond their comfort level to where their concern for the quality of life on this planet may be taken seriously and reflected in their work in a compelling way. That is, they need to screw their courage to the sticking point, so viewers get the point before the point is moot.

Think Green runs through Friday, January 30, at Art Dialogue Gallery.

—j. tim raymond