'Portraits of the Divine' indicts human smallness

Museum of Northwest Art Executive Director and Chief Curator Stefano Catalani has masterly assembled two powerful exhibits in the First Street space this summer: "Joseph Gregory Rossano: Portraits of the Divine" and "William Morris: Early Rituals." Each represents an artist at the height of his talent. Schedule an hour – or more – and go. Prepare to be moved – and amazed.

Catalini, as curator, sums up Rossano as "a multidisciplinary artist, environmentalist and outdoorsman." Absorbing the immense breadth of the exhibit and its three distinct themes shows that Rossano's multi-discipline interests cross art, science, theology, philosophy, literature and history. Rossano, Catalini writes, "invites the viewer to reflect on the divine oneness between humans and nature."

Selected for the gallery are the series "At the Top of Her Lungs," "Ivory" and "Whitewashed." There is also a menagerie of large-scale portraits, 4 feet by 8 feet, primarily, of extant and extinct animals and an almost 9-foot-tall sculpture of a polar bear.

This bear, pierced by seven arrows, looms over the entrance of the exhibit. This sculpture was too difficult to ascertain its meaning without reading the label: "St. Sebastian." Catholics know he was the martyred third century Christian saint. This typical American got lost in his association of arrows shot through bears with Indigenous Peoples.

Moving clockwise through the space, near the end visitors gaze at two tables of glass blown silver vases. Each has an oval designed to reflect the viewer's image. A label summarizes "Divine, Divinity, Deity / All languages have words that convey the ideas of 'god' and 'resemblance to a god.'" "Divinity" and "deity" are then defined.

Almost 200 years ago Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams." Today, far from innocent, Rossano indicts "the impact of human beings on the natural world," while, as Catalini notes, offering "a compassionate tribute to nature."

The "Whitewashed" pieces are literally whitewashed. Each sculpture is a "specimen case" – or a scaled-down coffin vertically on the wall. Pulled out at scheduled intervals are paintings that include an Atlantic sturgeon and an Atlantic bluefish tuna. Each case cover is a single large round of ancient Douglas fir.

Catalini writes, "Cracked and drowned in white paint, the rounds of the tree evoke the retreating and fractured Arctic ice pack and the threat to the existence of the polar bear." Rossano also has three extinct birds: a passenger pigeon, Eskimo curlew and Labrador duck Is the white paint streaked down their faces tears?

Catalini again: "'Whitewashed' holds us accountable for our delusion of concealment and lack of accountability."

Rossano's series "At the Top of Her Lungs" features a cast of wild animals struggling to inhale. Each is drawn in graphite on repurposed wood pallets, some with shipping instructions stenciled on bottom sections of the panel. The three paintings are on the far wall, seen above and over the tusks featured as "Ivory."

"Ivory," in the gallery's center, offers a gleaming pile of glass blown silver tusks, pick-up sticks helter-skeltered on a long low table of ancient Douglas fir. Writes Catalin: "Accompanying the tusks, portraits of imperiled megafauna from the Holocene, our current geological epoch, and those extinct since the Pleistocene stalk the gallery walls. Sensitively rendered in ash and tar on wood panels harvested from the very forests that have served as their homes for over 9,000 years, these creatures stare down at the viewer and the amassed ivory. More than any other work in the show, "Ivory" flashes before the viewer's eye the conflicted interconnectedness of humans and nature: from prehistoric survival to contemporary greed, the tusks are all that is left of a vanishing creature."

These portraits have small labels of DNA sequences.

The first portraits in the exhibit are the same media and framing materials and style as the megafauna paintings. The first, an Atlantic bluefin tuna and a Siberian tiger, have ANNO AETATIS SUAE in silver painted across the middle of the frame. That is Latin for "in the year of his age." Most include the Roman Numeral VII – seven, though the polar bear has XXXI – 33. Seven is associated with the holy, an important, hopefully miraculous number.

Rossano is perfectly paired with William Morris Early Rituals" in the Beneroya gallery. Five years younger than Morris, Rossano apprenticed with him, assisting with "Standing Stones."