McCauley's 'American Fiction' offered hard truths

Some artists realize their roles as canaries in our coal mines. Others pass. Robert McCauley told how he volunteers for the job, sharing his prophecies with an attentive audience of 25 Saturday, as his exhibit, “American Fiction” was about to close after 10 weeks at the Museum of Northwest Art.

McCauley, a Mount Vernon native whose father and grandfather logged the Cascades, uses his art, as a prophet, informing viewers that we are out of chances as well as resources.

Reviewing slides of paintings in and out of the exhibit, he shared his personal history with the Salish Sea biome and his pessimism that humans are not changing our destructive nature. He is only somewhat subtle. A painting looking westward at a Deception Pass that is bridgeless, is a scene he has never seen. The bridge was built before he was born. While the sky is yellow and the clouds gray, no sunset is portrayed.

The skies have the yellowish orange tint of apocalyptic times, but most telling is the pointed cap under the glass globe labeled “Dunce.” The painting’s title? “A Brief History of Westward Expansion: Deception Pass (Pre-Bridge).”

McCauley told his audience, “I paint bears, but I don’t want to be a bear.” A placard on an exhibit wall reads “[ McCauley] uses the Black Bear as a metaphor for the human. ‘What we do to nature we do to ourselves.’”

Earlier, McCauley shared that he paints his bears with human eyes.

He posed the question, “Why am I doing what I am doing?” and spent the next 45 minutes answering it. He admitted to being a frustrated writer, then said “I have no intention of providing pretty pictures. I think artists have a responsibility to the world they live in.

McCauley, 72, has spent his professional life being responsible, as an artist, professor and chair of the Rockford University art department. He has thought deeply about Europeans conquest, in every way, of the North American continent. The aftermath, the ruins to natives and nature, is his subject matter.

As he said Saturday: “There could have been other ways to do it. This problem we can still solve today.”

His art is intense, but the artist has a sense of humor: Microphones are painted into scenes, one with a tree downed by a beaver, to finally answer the question of felled trees making a sound if no one is around.

And then there are the stacked turtles, from the 19th century remark that its “turtles all the way down,” holding the Earth up.

Finally, McCauley challenges us to analyze as well as think, showing a slide, his deer head upside down, floating in the canvas, with the words “right side up” imposed over the deer.

“What do you believe?” he asked the group. Clearly McCauley believes we must look closer, think more deeply about the history of our actions and change – massively redirect – our relationships with the world we have so thoughtlessly, blindly chewed up and spit out.

“American Fiction” ran March 31-June 10 at MoNA after premiering at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. It was co-curated by Greg Robinson, BIMA’s chief curator and Kathleen Moles, formerly with MoNA.