REVIEW: Urban Nature by Rachel Cole The current group exhibit at the Denver Botanic Gardens, Urban Nature, presents a horizon that is fragmentary, uncontained, finite, damaged, kaleidoscopic, tenuous, exquisite, paradoxical. As the title suggests, "Street," or perhaps better termed in this case, "post-graffiti" artists were challenged to explore the nexus of urban and natural environments. The pretext of this idea - mingling figures opposing each other in a duality - further reassesses various other dualistic structures. In addition to processing urban and natural landscapes, there is a recurring theme of the female form, gender opposites, and Armageddon narrative. There is also a repeated collapse of genre, via the gesture of painting, between the starkly realist and the symbol-heavy surrealist. The landscape exists somewhere between the raw actuality of poverty, pollution, loss and a plane of dream association, metaphor, intuition. The project is not anti-dualist (a philosophical stance that requires the methodical debunking of dual structures), but I would like to suggest that much of it is pre-dualist, aligned with pre-Platonic philosophy that didn't separate divinity from matter. To quote Milesian philosopher Thales, "The Gods are in everything." Figures are distinguishable from each other, and some of them even seem to represent opposites, but the interaction between them isn't a rigid play of dominant vs. submissive. The unseen world of mystery and spirit inhabits the material world - biological as well as human-made. Book of Paintings by Mac, a 120-foot long painting of two sleeping women, one rendered in green, the other in blue, examines landscape by way of the resting female form and makes it not only metaphorical for adjacent landscapes (the woman in green represents nature, the woman in blue represents urban environment) but turns the female figure into the landscape through enlarged scale. Their two statures that set up the basic structure of a duality, nonetheless resist dualism. They aren't perfectly opposite, but they aren't the same. They are loose mirror inverses of each other, but also self-contained, the images metaphorical (outlines mimicking Denver's view of the mountains as well as the view from the mountains of Denver) and unloaded, the reflection in itself. The title references a poem written by 15th-century, Mexican monarch, Nezahualcoyotl, in which he states, "With flowers you paint, O giver of life/ We live only in your book of paintings here on earth." This poetic bestowal of matter on divinity and divinity on matter is expressed here through the implication that afterlife doesn't exist, that earthly life is also the life of the soul. Mac's images reinforce this as well, for the women in the painting are seemingly asleep, dreaming in this "book of paintings" but are also possibly dead, their bodies shifting to rejoin the landscape. Another artist to take up the human body as comparative to landscape is Lady Pink, particularly in Reclining Brick Man and Brick Woman Laying, also a large-scale painting. The giant man and woman writhing in the foreground are made of brick, windows and doors open from their torsos, contrasting anatomy to architecture. They seem half-live, half-dead, the woman raising her head to glance at the view of the city, the man's form still but illuminated. The gender differences between them are basic and minor. Except for breasts on the female figure, they are otherwise rather androgynous. They aren't Adam and Eve, or Mother and Father, but two human-shaped houses, seeming to move with slow-motion and sensuality. The suggestion that a city of concrete and metal is inhabited by spirits(comparable to cross-cultural belief systems that nature is inhabited by spirits), endows the urban environment with a romance of mythology and a soulfulness of scene. The pre-dualist, reflectionary nature of the composition is even present in the title, which makes the male and female figures' actions synonymous (reclining, lying) and almost mirror-like. If the Botanic Gardens are something of a paradise in the city, then expect to be confronted by images of hell in this exhibit, as well. Countered to the renderings of deities and trees of life, a material world so rich in spirit and fable, are representations of Apocalypse. In Mortar Culture 2, Delton Demarest depicts the absolute takeover of nature by urbanscape, a total violation by the dominant entity in the dualism. His painting of trees made of metal and concrete evoke, as the curator notes, an imagined future in which natural life is obliterated and humans will be forced to create replicas. In "Solitude," Adam Moorhead paints a scene of pigeons leering over a resting man in a park, almost cinematic, as if something really exciting and horrific is about to happen. The figure teeters on the edge of death if not at least a savage pecking. In this painting, the man is like other depictions of humans in the exhibit, as previously discussed, absorbed into the landscape. Except his process of absorption is closer to decay and disappearance. Amanda Marie's Untitled wraparound piece collages motifs in the style of childhood picture-book iconography. Though cheery and humorous, it is open to a darker reading of displacement and loss, too. An octopus lounges in a child's bed holding balloons (weirdly reminiscent of the cartoon art in the entranceway of the old Children's Hospital, implying disease), ducks swim in sprinting bathtubs and become dotted lines below the surface of the water, a little girl rides a horse following arrows pointing to a house but looks at her shoes as if careless. In the background of Marie's work are ghostly outlines, shapes, flat patterns of the action in the foreground, as if the shadows or spirits of the images are disconnected from the images themselves. Childhood innocence, so often related to nature, particularly by the English Romantic poets, dissolves into background shapes. Some of the children, small narrators of the scenery, seem disenchanted despite their fantastical surroundings. Innocence is still present for Marie, but it's also in a children's book, something for the bright colors of nostalgia. The installation layout of Urban Nature is probably the best part: paintings lodged throughout the gardens, springing up in flowerbeds, overlooking pools of water, nestled in a grove of trees. This is another way that dualisms smear into each other: the paintings aren't actual plants and the plants aren't paintings, but the layers of reality between them meld, bump against each other, fit into a multi-dimensional composition.