For Brooklyn artist Karin Weiner, the threat that humanity
poses to the environment is alarmingly grave. In Clear Cut, her
debut exhibition at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, she contrasts images of
dense housing that climbs to impossible heights with clear-cut forest
floors, as desolate as cemeteries. Though this thematic agenda might
lead you to expect her work to be deadly serious, it’s just the
opposite. Full of light, humor, and visual twists, her work
refreshingly addresses an intractable social ill without stooping to
brainless sloganeering.
Interestingly, Weiner’s work very simply participates in a solution
to the problems she identifies. Composed of images from old magazines
and books, her collages literally recycle paper products, thereby
conserving the shrinking resources she depicts. Likewise, in her
installation, “Clear Cut,” she creates a logged patch of forest on the
gallery floor using reclaimed materials. Wound layers of corrugated
cardboard become stumps, while stones and stands of undergrowth are
sewn from thrift store fabrics.
The viral spread of civilization may be a grim reality, but Weiner’s
collages are loaded with enough absurdity to nearly transcend all that
doom and gloom. In “Our Fine Feathered Friends Assist with the
Relocation,” an assortment of birds takes flight on a plane of soft
yellow, moving household items. A caned chair loops around a goose’s
neck; a hummingbird carries a teapot in its beak; and an eagle grips a
bicycle in its talons. Notably, many of the items are conspicuously
branded, from a Zenith radio to a Nikon camera, suggesting the birds
have united to eradicate consumerism.
While Weiner removes these items from their original contexts to
create new tableaus, there is also a discernible urge to impose order
and stability. Just as dozens of species of birds are crammed into “Our
Fine Feathered Friends,” elsewhere countless houses—of varying
scales and styles—occupy the same cramped spaces. It’s as if
Weiner is perpetrating some faux scientific categorization, in which
images are obsessively collected and grouped for the sheer sake of
their likenesses. This compulsive need to create order, even if only
within the confines of her artwork, hints that altering the fate of the
environment is a more daunting task than her charmingly playful work is
ready to admit. JOHN MOTLEY