The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is an objectively strange place for an art exhibit. The building, more bunker than gallery, is a dense centralized archive of plastinated, taxidermied and otherwise preserved specimens kept in ordered black shelving units whose drawers are mostly locked.
To find Lisa Matthias’s Peatland Mosses: A Printmaking Perspective (and I recommend you do), look behind the blue whale, to the left. Mounted on the concrete walls of a narrow side hallway are her 21 formidable prints of peatland bryophytes.
Take “Stem Leaves and Hyaline Cells,” an eight-foot-long piece. In it, Sphagnum divinum (sphagnum moss) cells compete to occupy Matthias’s negative and positive spaces. Applying her experience in botany and ecology, Matthias began at the microscope, magnifying her collected specimens up to 1000x their actual size. Then, she composed this print using hand-carved woodblock — a process she estimates took 30 to 40 hours of careful drawing and sculpture.
As you might expect from an expert printmaker and ecologist, Matthias pays close attention to shapes. She notes in an artist’s statement that the rectangular pieces are meant to embody “both the rectangular microscope slides I used to study moss specimens, and the idea of landscape.” Both of these forms imply a kind of hyper-visibility that I think doesn’t quite capture the full effect of the exhibit.
Just a few minutes earlier, I was staring at moths pinned neatly apart in the formal Beaty collection. Every crease in each wing was pulled taut and brightly-lit for maximum visibility. But in “Stem Leaves and Hyaline Cells” my eyes struggle to parse background from foreground — where the “subject” begins, where one cell overlaps another. There’s something strange and hypnotizing about Matthias’s occluded anatomy. It reminds me of the ideas of philosopher of art named Allen Carlson, who thinks that there are only three ways to aesthetically appreciate nature.
According to Carlson, you either adopt the object model (taking a piece of driftwood from the beach to keep) or the landscape model (usually a painting, or a photograph) or the more complex environmental model. In the latter, nature is not the usual “unobtrusive background” of human activities, but “the obtrusive foreground” which must be experienced with an appropriate degree of understanding. Carlson thinks the environmental model is the only way to really aesthetically appreciate nature as nature. This makes scientists something like nature’s sharpest art critics.
Matthias’s curious hybridization of the landscape painting and the microscope slide strikes me as something Carlson might approve of.
Think of it this way: pretty moths pinned in their cases for examination exemplify the object model — extracted from their environment in order to be appreciated out of context. I may have thought the moths were beautiful behind the glass, but the beauty I perceived was coming from an object on display, and really, moths (even long dead ones) aren’t objects. According to Carlson, they’re nature, and so belong to a natural unity that matters to appreciate them. As for landscapes, those were somewhere else — probably an art gallery.
But here at the Beaty, blown up on the wall, was an obtrusive foreground of microscopic moss cells.
Matthias relates her work to traditional landscape paintings, but the connection is more wink than nod. Landscapes, according to Carlson, turn nature into “a grandiose prospect seen from a specific standpoint and distance.” Matthias’s specific distance is no distance at all; her prospect smaller than a fingernail. With a discerning botanist’s eye she catches tiny details and with an artist's hands she shows us — the ignorant and inexpert — that they are beautiful. Even more importantly, somewhere in between science and aesthetics, Matthias knows that to evoke the sphagnum mosses as they are requires some tangle and overlap.
One of the nice things about Carlson’s theory is that it leads to “positive aesthetics,” which means that, if we take his conclusions to their furthest possible extent, absolutely everything in nature can be beautiful. The entomologist can show you the beauty of a cockroach, the meteorologist, a rain cloud. If you happen to share my contrarian sensibility, you might argue that since it’s too hard to meaningfully distinguish nature from anything else (What makes a highway next to a field of flowers separate from that ecosystem? Doesn’t it, too, affect the birds and bugs?) then perhaps everything can be beautiful if we pay enough attention to it.
That’s a sappy conclusion for an art review, so here’s this thought instead: the noble thing about Matthias’s art is that it treats sphagnum mosses on their own terms. These prints don’t start with their visually pleasing qualities.
Matthias starts in the field, where she knows her plants’ Latin names and how they interact with an ecosystem. Onto this, she adds abstract lines and colouring to, in her words, “convey both texture and the feeling of immersion in nature.” Immersion, attention, investigation: this isn’t nature as art.
Peatland Mosses: A Printmaking Perspective is nature as nature, and so belongs at the Beaty.
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