If ecological peril and the wide-ranging effects of climate change amount to a looming existential threat, artists of any degree of awareness can’t help but factor the subject into their work. But artistic responses and moral mileage can vary widely. Some artists deal with the anxiety with a sense of alarm and bold strokes in their work, while others willfully ignore the elephant in the global room, waving the banner of “art for art’s sake” escapism.
And then there are contemporary artists who stake out a fruitful and personal middle ground path, finding poetically expressive roots to triggering eco-activist ends. Such is the case with Madeleine Tonzi, half of the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art’s new two-person show, Entangled: Responding to Environmental Crisis, also featuring the post-graffiti, neo-pre-Columbian art by the Bay Area artist known as GATS (Graffiti Against the System). It can reasonably be said that each artist is earthy, from divergent angles on the meaning of the word.
GATS goes his own way, placing a mysterious recurring masked figure in multiple settings. They span a range of cultural links, from the Mayan world to the skateboard art, painted saw blades, a meditative cave-like enclosure (“Keep on Trying”) and the code-stamped realm of graffiti. Downstairs in the museum, one piece finds a tagger in flight, with the dryly quipping text, “I’m not the president of graffiti, but I’m running.”