CLIMATE ALARM CLARION

 

'' Sounding an alarm - but unobtrusively. '' To stress climate change, two artists employ low-key, ambiguous approaches.

The environmental artist and activist Jenny Kendler favors a gentle form of persuasion when introducing ideas around climate change : '' I am to seduce people through beauty,'' Kendler said in a recent phone interview.

In Fort Jay, the 19th century bunker on Governors Island in New York City, Kendler, 43, has installed nine sculptures about endangered marine life and ecosystems with ingredients from the ocean itself - seawater, found whale parts and recordings of humpback song.

The centerpiece is '' Other of Pearl,'' Kendler's serial work comprising rainbow-lipped oysters in 12 half shells. Oysters filter coastal waters and help protect against flooding.

Pollution and dredging have destroyed many of their habitats. A Governors Island initiative is hurrying to restore oyster reefs to New York Harbor.

By collaborating with these living creatures, Kendler, a sometime member of the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion Chicago, wants to embrace '' the interconnectedness between humans and non humans.''

Like vanitas works, Kendler's oysters are vaguely terrifying denials of human supremacy. And yet they are exquisite and covetable objects. I spent a long time looking at them. 

'' I aim to connect with people through beauty and subtlety, and all of the good logic that good art can bring,'' Kendler explained. '' I knew that wasn't going to happen by slapping people upside the head with didacticism.''

Kendler is one of the two artists whose works carry a multiplicity of visual meanings - thrillingly and even uncomfortably - without a clear lesson. 

The other is the sculptor Michael Wang, whose latest New New York show shapes uranium into visually pleasing sculptures that also provoke disgust.

Kendler and Wang appreciate ambiguity even as they allude to crisis.

One recently closed show that saw no ambiguity was the multimedia '' Coal + Ice '' at the Asia Society in New York.

Documentary photos and footage of the coal industry horrors - spanning 100 years and over 30 artists and photographers - were projected throughout rooms of back-to-back screens.

Blackened miners, barren landscapes, flooded towns, displaced people. No end in sight. It was one of the most effective '' immersive '' rooms I've seen.

The World Students Society thanks Walker Mimms.