Art faculty address global warming in joint exhibition

“Umbrella Island, 2014,” by Timothy McDowell. (Home page thumbnail: detail from “Mesa Barn with Stream Tube, 2014,” by Timothy McDowell.)

The Connecticut College Department of Art presents “Towards A New Reality,” a cooperative installation of works by Associate Professor of Art Gregory Bailey and Professor of Art Timothy McDowell. The exhibition will be on display in the Cummings Arts Center Galleries through March 5.

The sculptures, dioramas, prints and paintings that comprise “Towards A New Reality” are responses to “the increasingly ominous data and subsequent scientific warnings of the environmental situation underway on our planet,” according to the artists — “the ever-present, daily discourse on rising temperatures, rising oceans, rising CO2 levels, and dangerous climatic changes that seems to have us spiraling towards a new reality.”

While the artwork is not conspicuously political, the work embraces an opinion that global warming is real and offers a means of coping through images and objects that attempt to provide real or imagined solutions, depictions of an uncertain future and nature in defiance of human control.

Bailey and McDowell will give a gallery talk at 4:15 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 19. A reception will follow from 5 to 6 p.m.

The Cummings Arts Center Galleries are open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. and weekend days from 1-4 p.m. For more information, contact the art department at 860-439-2740.

January 27, 2014