Two new exhibitions at the Vero Beach Museum of Art might be titled “Beauty and the Beast”: in the Schumann Gallery, “Howard Ben Tré: New Sculpture” features serenely radiant glass and bronze sculptures, while the Titelman Gallery’s “Environmental Photography” presents discomfiting images of pollution and climate change by Kael Alford, James Balog, Richard Misrach and Brooke Singer.
The two shows have at least one thing in common: their artists’ technical proficiency can turn base materials into aesthetic gold.
Four columns of greenish translucent glass mounted in sockets of bronze dominate the gallery in Howard Ben Tré’s show. The sculptures, from the artist’s 2008 series, “The Lightness of Being,” were inspired by architectural details, including spires, minarets, and columns from around the world.
“He draws these forms from Islamic, European, and other architectural traditions,” says museum curator Jay Williams. Ben Tré likes to mix things up in his work, using, say, a finial shape from one culture and the design of a column shaft from another.
The artist also relates his work to the human figure, says Williams, with the finial standing in for a head, the column for the body and the pedestal for the human foot. Evidently, viewers of the sculptures concur with that reading.
“The fact that these are of different proportions, and different heights – people refer to them almost as you would refer to people of varying heights,” Williams says.
Standing two inches shy of eight feet tall, the tallest sculpture in the exhibition, “Lightness of Being #5/1” is probably taller than anybody you know, and at only 9 ¾ inches in diameter, is probably thinner, too.
Nevertheless, there is something so humanly imposing about the sculptures that you instinctively leave them some personal space when you walk up to them.
Perhaps it is the works’ quotations from sacred architecture that give them their presence. The fluted columns on a couple of the works recall those of the Parthenon, while the finials on all four sculptures appear to be borrowed from Asian pagodas. Brilliantly lit from above, the glowing sculptures stand like slender saints in a marble chapel.
The idea for the exhibition, which also includes three smaller pedestal-mounted sculptures and several works on paper, was inspired by the Ben Tré sculpture in the VBMA permanent collection, “Bearing Figure with Alabastron.”
That 1996 work, on display in the museum’s foyer, was from a series based on vessel forms from different cultures, according to Williams.
“They were all bounded by stone or bronze, but his newer work is so different,” Williams says.
Architecture also figures in the “Environmental Photography” exhibition, but the narrative of environmental abasement, global warming and habitat loss behind the pictures is not always readily apparent.
“I wrote a lot of labels for this,” says Williams.
Take, for example, the over five-by-six foot photo print by Richard Misrach titled “Norco Cumulus Cloud, Shell Oil Refinery, Norco, LA” from 1998.
The titular refinery, centered behind trees at the end of a long field, looks tiny and benign under a vast sky that holds a single, puffy white cloud.
Norco, we read, is the site of a huge oil refinery that emits clouds of moisture combined with volatile hydrocarbons every day, all day long. This site, 25 miles upriver from New Orleans, is part of a stretch along the Mississippi nicknamed “Cancer Alley” for its petrochemical plants.
Misrach began his photographic study of Cancer Alley in 1998 when the High Museum in Atlanta commissioned him to create a body of photographs for its “Picturing the South” series. Five photos from this series are on loan to the VBMA from the High Museum, and each seems bleaker than the next.
Strangely enough, the photo that shows the most horrific miasma is one of the most beautiful in the gallery. In “Night Releases, Mississippi Corridor” the solid forms of railroad tank cars and the skeletal towers of a gas cracking plant – where oil is turned into gasoline – are shrouded in a pink-stained vaporous gauze. The scene is worthy of J.M.W. Turner, who painted the industrial landscapes of early 19th century England in all its smoggy glory.
A series by Kael Alford is also based in Louisiana. Her pictures show the sinking of two small islands, Isle de Jean Charles and Pointe-aux-Chenes. The islands are home to a community of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians, trappers and fishermen who settled there in the late19th century. Kael’s maternal grandmother hailed from there.
“When oil and gas production began in Louisiana, they cut a lot of canals through the wetlands for access,” says Williams. “They also channelized the river.”
He explains that the human-made channels no longer allow river silt to be deposited around the islands; it instead flows farther out into the gulf. Without the accumulation of new silt, the islands are eroding away – with disastrous results not only for the islands’ natural environment, but for the homes and livelihood of their human residents.
Two photographers with ties to Vero Beach are represented in the show: and Balog have parents who live here.
Singer is a photojournalist and writer who began photographing Superfund sites around the U.S. in 2007 for her online series, “Superfund 365.” That project featured a different toxic waste site every day for a year.
“Tower Chemical, Claremont, FL.” in the exhibition is one of these. The photo was taken in a well-kept but aged mobile home park near the site of a company that furnished DDT and other chemicals to agriculture.
“They just dumped a lot of the chemical residue into a nearby swamp, which went into a nearby creek which went into Lake Apopka. They are still monitoring the ground water,” says Williams.
Balog may be remembered by some museum goers for his solo show, “Survivors,” presented in the museum’s Holmes Gallery back in 1997. Four images of animals from that series are presented in the current exhibition, along with two photos that document the 2010 Gulf oil disaster and two photos of glacial ice from Greenland and Iceland. Balog documented the effects of climate change on glaciers over several years in a series of still photos as well as his documentary film, “Chasing Ice.”
If confronting pictures of man-made natural catastrophe may not be everyone’s idea of an afternoon at the art museum, Williams see the point of this exhibition. “We all need to be aware of this whole history of environmental degradation.”
“Especially with the Superfund sites, land loss, or pollution – the reason these things happen is because citizens generally are just unaware,” says Williams. “These activist artists are letting us know in terms we can understand; they make the situation real for us.”
Indeed, for local residents, the exhibition hits especially close to home: Vero Beach has its very own Superfund site. The EPA put the 80-acre Piper Aircraft Corp. and Vero Beach Water and Sewer Department on its National Priorities List back in 1990 because of groundwater contaminated with trichloroethylene. According the EPA’s website, ground water treatment and monitoring of the site are ongoing.
“Howard Ben Tré: New Sculpture” runs through May 17; “Environmental Photography” runs through May 24.