Nature, memory and nostalgia at Artspace

Details from Karla Knight's Life in Space and David Barton's Artistic Syncretism: African Dream Painting on display at Artspace.

Hong Seon Jang, Shannon Gagne, Lisa Dillin, Karla Knight, Robin Press, David Barton

Ends May 1. Artspace, 50 Orange St. 203-772-2709, arespacenh.org

Nature and nostalgia are often tandem thematic conspirators in art. We may know we’re disconnected from nature and recognize it as palpably foreign, yet there is that persistent, irritating beacon sounding from the back of somewhere telling us it wasn’t always so and prompting us to fix this quixotic ill fit.

This is nostalgia’s chance to work its mojo — to lobby for a forgotten connection with the natural world. Though it has different connotations now, nostalgia was once thought of as an illness — a problem of being poorly adjusted to the world at hand.

This is partly what is so appealing about the work of three of the artists in Artspace’s new spring exhibition. Though each looks to nature for reference and content, there is little nostalgia in evidence. Rather, nature is served up strange and fantastically other.

Hong Seon Jang is masterful with materials. “Geographic Wave” is a pantomime of geologic drip — an accretion of rock-like forms creeping down the gallery wall. It’s composed of ripped bundles of National Geographic magazines, the gradations of which hide and reveal a multitude of disconnected images. In its layers and topographies, it’s like a jumbled montage of ethnographic fancy.

Across the wall, Shannon Gagne presents “Breaking Roots” an installation of glass, ceramic and wood. Dominated by clear blobs of various sizes, each looking like drops of an odd, viscous fluid, the installation spreads across the floor and up the wall meeting shapes of wood and shards of glass. While the gestational and generative is evoked, what resonates strongest is the otherworldliness of these apparitions.

Lisa Dillin’s take is more directly critical. Her installation, “Office Units: Surrogate Prototypes,” begins with bland simulacra — an office space presented deadpan. But alas, under the desk is a small opening meant to be explored. Crawl under and witness a mini habitable diorama — a cave of cream-colored faux rock. The special treat is the video screen built into the floor. It’s an image of a cave pool punctuated by the sound and sight of an intermittent drop of water. Go in and hear this odd euphony marking time under the stagnant cultural geology above.

Nature, but not necessarily nostalgia, is left behind in the work of the three other artists in the show.

Karla Knight presents Life in Space, a series of charcoal on paper drawings paired with an invented language system. Symbolic writing and variations on circular, ovoid and spherical shapes emerge from worn-looking paper reminiscent of old textbooks. They are like pictures from an arcane scientific inquiry into the voids and shapes of language — pictures of the gap between sign and signified.

Remembering is the key in Robin Press’ visual and auditory installation “The Memory Project.” Press collects the recollections of others and presents them to us. In one gallery, we see a dozen small silk-screened pictures with superimposed text. From another gallery, we hear the artist reading these memories aloud. Press is acting as an artist-folklorist, soliciting and curating a collection of memories retold that span the spectrum of nostalgia and poignancy, and have both personal and common currency.

David Barton’s paintings remember as well. In Artistic Syncretism: African Dream Paintings, Barton represents visions of exotic traditional masks and headdresses of Central Africa inspired from travel stories told to him.

The largest, “Big Ears,” is a picture of solid, declarative strength with focused detail and passages of gestural emphasis. Artifacts like the ones Barton depicts have long since been collected by museums and made familiar but Barton’s paintings are like a vault for memories of a disappearing knowledge.

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