Rockland art center takes on contemporary issues in 2 shows

The big questions for me are: How impactfully does this exhibit perturb us and spur us to outrage, or to actually do something about the issue at hand? And when do polemics generate the opposite, almost somnambulant response? The single-most haunting gesture of this show is not visual. It is an audio recording that plays in the gallery, explained on a wall text this way:

The birdsong you hear is a 1976 recording made in Hawai’i, of the last living bird of the species: the male Kaua’i ō’ō. 

His call is for a mate that will never come.

The species is now extinct.

Let’s forget the dramatic cadence of the words. This bygone sound is breathtakingly tragic, the realization of its truth triggering mourning, grief, rage and fear all at once. This establishes a premise of absence that supports the many birdhouse sculptures in the exhibit, their hole openings suddenly becoming symbols of something ominous and melancholy.

 Moffett’s white paintings – made by extruding oil paint onto linen so it looks almost like a shag rug – are elegant messengers of these emotions. The holes in some of them display a uvula, the fleshy extension that hangs at the back of the throat, which, in the context of this exhibition, comes across as a silent scream. Moffett has used this texture before, but here he adds a new element: plaster casts of his crew’s hands.

I willingly surrendered to these, admiring how their positions – a hooked finger, an open hand – evoked a supposedly friendly invitation of a perch, yet also said something about how a welcoming gesture can be the enticement that kills. At whose hands, after all, did the Kaua’i ō’ō become extinct? One painting with crossed fingers called to mind a gesture common to images of Christ, which, for me at least, was a reading that implied the dangerous presumption of humans playing God over nature.

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Read full review at pressherald.com.