Mary Kline-Misol’s oil-painted triptych “The Ghost of John Muir” anchors an exhibition that opens Monday at Grand View University’s Rasmussen Center. (Image courtesy of the artist)
By Michael Morain
Editor
NASA launched the space probe Voyager 1 almost 50 years ago and it’s still going. It passed Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980, left the solar system and is now more than 15 billion miles from Earth — going, going, almost gone. It sends occasional postcards, including photos of the “pale blue dot” we call home.
Now that planet, which the ancient Greeks called “Gaia,” is the subject of an exhibition that opens Monday and runs through Nov. 21 at Grand View University’s Rasmussen Center. “Gaia II: The Pale Blue Dot” draws connections between art, science and spirituality, with oil paintings by local artist Mary Kline-Misol and a multimedia display by conservationist Christine Curry. They’ll discuss their work at 7 p.m. next Friday, Oct. 24, during a gallery reception from 5 to 8 p.m.
Kline-Misol calls the show “a gentle plea for a kinder attitude toward our planet.”
“This is a time when artists can make an impact,” she said. “I really do think we have a responsibility to do that.”
She started the “Gaia” project three years ago at a gallery in Valley Junction, where she displayed a portrait of Chief Seattle flanked by a pair of owls. This time around, she’s turned her attention to three environmentalists from three very different walks of life: Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century German nun, writer and herbalist; John Muir, the naturalist and so-called Father of the National Parks; and Aldo Leopold, the ecologist from Burlington who wrote “A Sand County Almanac.”
For each portrait, “I do a lot of research,” Kline-Misol said. “I really try to channel these individuals.”
The rest of her paintings in the show are her “woodsy pieces,” inspired by plants and animals she’s spotted in her backyard in Clive and along the greenbelt trail.
Curry’s part of the exhibition touts a fictitious sparkling-water company called “Pure Iowa.” She designed a sculpture to look like a giant aluminum can, plus a series of posters that feature six different Iowa streams and “farmer champions” who are working to clean them up.
She’d been promoting water quality for years and had tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade craft breweries to help spread the word. Inspiration struck when she saw a “CBS News Sunday Morning” segment about Andy Warhol and his soup cans.
“It’s sort of a tongue-in-cheek joke about ‘pure’ Iowa,” she said. “So many people drive around and see the rolling green hills and white puffy clouds, and they think, ‘How could there be anything wrong with it?’ But it’s deceiving.”
So what would Warhol think? It’s hard to say, but he could probably get behind it. He once noted, after all, that “having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want.”
