‘The Navigators’ uses animals as muse and metaphor

The birds sitting across the street on the telephone wire and the dog playing next door seem like ordinary and innocuous players in the world, but they take an outsize role in the exhibition The Navigators.

Animals are muse and metaphor, and embody stories touching on the hopes and fears of humanity.

This becomes clear as you enter the comfortable environs of Var Gallery in Walker’s Point.

Some of the first pieces you encounter are Jenie Gao’s India-ink drawings on paper, where pointillist designs coalesce into figures and shapes. The intriguing “Nothing is Hidden, But Not Everything is Seen” shows diminutive flocks of birds swooping around a larger form that could be a landscape — or a sleeping dog.

Birds and dogs are especially potent in Gao’s work and in the techniques of metamorphosis whereby one figure becomes another.

Three dogs inhabit a cloudy, sparse space in “A Manipulated Evolution.” Two in the foreground spar like wild animals, and parts of their bodies take on the forms of guns embedded in their flesh or as part of bionic limbs. The third dog is placid in the background, wearing a collar that marks domesticity but with a face that is transformed into a bullhorn.

Gao’s “The Messenger’s Revolution” brings the post-apocalyptic world into broader focus with a cosmic conflict. As viewers, our vantage point is from some elevated place, and we look to the ground below. Small hunters shoot at a flock of birds in the distance, but near us in the foreground is a large, tank-like machine. From an open hatch, a hand emerges holding a bird, and winged figures holding swords float around the tank’s gun. Undercurrents of aggression and a battle to be waged in the air and on earth are palpable.

Screen prints and sculpture

Comparatively quieter, Emily Arthur’s screen prints also draw from nature. Fine-lined birds and butterflies are suspended against neutral, empty spaces with elegant airiness. Discreet lines of charts, diagrams, text and other documentary marks decorate the backgrounds. The boldness of the animals stands in contrast and renders the background information into a whisper that measures, trying to understand what these figures have to tell us.

For Arthur, nature is a language through which aspects of displacement can be examined. “Elements of Endangerment” is one example. A large butterfly with wings of green and purple appears like a colorful silhouette or a captured specimen. A trio of small birds is similarly laid out on the side of the composition. The creatures occupy a place that is disquietingly captive, removed from their world.

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Working in sculpture, Jaymee Harvey Williams uses animal motifs that are metaphoric and fantastical. Found objects like pearls and dollhouse furniture are incorporated into tiny pieces atop pedestals, as well as monumental installations. Like fairy tales and fantasies, these creatures are anthropomorphized, taking on human characteristics and attitudes. “Mother Wit, Yet Not a Mother” stands like a tall riddle. It is a long-billed duck wearing a crown and standing on legs made of pick axes. What has the sage to say? Perhaps there are clues in the book at its feet, turned to a page that is titled, “A Small Boy in the Costume of a Big King.”

The Navigators exhibition is one where multiple paths and purposes may be found, but if there is one element that ties all of this together, it is the refrain of nature as a touchstone and guide. To find our way, that is a direction we should heed.

On exhibit

The Navigators continues through Oct. 28 at Var Gallery, 643 S. 2nd St., Milwaukee.

Exhibitions

Alphonse Mucha

David Barnett Gallery

1024 E. State St., Milwaukee

Exhibition continues through Jan. 13, 2018.

Works from the legendary Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha will be on display, including double-sided lithographs from Ilsée Princesse de Tripoli, as well as related works by other artists of this late-19th and early 20th-century movement.

True Lies

RedLine Milwaukee

1422 N. 4th St.

Exhibition continues through Nov. 25.

The sixth installment in this CultureJam MKE series, this exhibition presents 30 artists examining ways we think about truth, falsehood and what lies in between.