In the here and now

In a haiku, the still-revered 16th-century master of the Japanese tea ceremony, Sen no Rikyu, wrote:

Sometimes a person may feel embarrassed to ask questions.

That embarrassment should be set aside and questions asked.

Well, let it be known, the artists in "This Here Now: Nature and Human Consciousness" do not feel embarrassed. In fact, Guido Alvarez, Christine Baeumler, Jil Evans, Jill Ewald and Chris Larson ask the really big questions without blushing -- such as: What is "nature," "human consciousness" and "meaning"? -- and transform their responses into mixed-media installations, each taking a unique aesthetic approach.

However, their conclusions are not self-evident. How could they be? Such answers do not come easily, nor are they for the intellectually faint of heart. As Wayne Roosa, an art historian at Bethel University in Arden Hills, writes in the exhibition essay, "the artworks explore the relations between nature, experience, symbolic systems of knowledge and human consciousness, asking how we navigate and mediate these different states as liminal beings." Liminal? That's us. As conscious human beings we are liminal; we can exist in transitional states, or on both sides of a boundary, "between states of nature and states of mind."

The installations are provocative and, given the artists' quest of the abstract, each is unexpectedly resolved as a visual work of art. Combining variously found objects, painting, sculpture and photography, the one element shared by all five installations is the integration of technology. Video, both archived and live streaming, audio and animation undergird their investigations, and inject this centuries-old philosophical dialogue with street cred of the present.

In Alvarez's "Temporal Flow" -- a small mountain of more than a dozen monitors, cameras and screens, an aquarium and a vase of dried flowers -- a salamander is the protagonist, existing digitally in video loops of the past and as a living creature in a video streaming live from a remote location. The creature is simultaneously present and absent.

In a surprise move, Evans has traded in her expressive paintbrush for a projected, digital animation loop depicting shadows passing over the notebook she used while visiting the Galapagos Islands. Titled "A New Book of Nature," the work is haunting in its flickering spareness, allowing the viewer to consciously drift between the past and the present, the known and unknown.

The paintings and videos in Ewald's "My Arctic" were inspired by sailing in the Arctic Ocean. A video of the voyage plays off of two videos depicting the surfaces of her painting, creating parallel geographies with compelling results.

Larson, in an "Untitled" installation, combines familiar elements from previous installations and videos, such as his hallmark wood architectural frameworks, a live video feed and a gray wool felt suit, continuing his dialogue about nature and human activity, creation and destruction.

Collectively, the installations address notions of hope and loss, the future and the past, and ask how we might accommodate these states of consciousness in the present. The destruction of our natural environment operates as a subtext in all of the works. As our natural environments disappear, do we still maintain the same sense of consciousness? Or will we possess only an altered or secondary experience of things and places -- a quality that prompts Baeumler to call her photographs "specimens of experience." Each artist seems to ask: What, exactly, is unique and what is compromised about nature and our human consciousness?

Curators Baeumler, Evans and Ewald give the show a historical context through the inclusion of prints by 10 historical and contemporary artists such as Rembrandt, Piranesi and Nicolas Africano (borrowed from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts) who have grappled with the same heady questions. Oddly, in the shadow of the installations, these prints -- as good as they are -- seem almost an afterthought, if that can be said about a Rembrandt.

Also in Northfield

Nearby at the Carleton College Art Gallery is "Prints Around the Pacific Rim," organized for this week's Mid-America Print Council conference. Featuring the work of seven artists from Japan, Hawaii, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, the prints reflect indigenous and global influences.