JACQUELINE BISHOP’S ART REVEALS

MAN’S RIFT WITH THE EARTH

By Doug MacCash, Art Critic,  NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE

Jacqueline Bishop, whose new exhibit “Trespass” is on display at Arthur Roger Gallery, considers herself an ecologist and an artist. For years her jewel-like hyper-detailed paintings have dealt with the plight of rain forest beasts and birds, she’s traveled to Brazil several times to witness the loss of habitat firsthand, she teaches an art and ecology class at Loyola University, and lectures at ecology conferences across the country and around the globe.

In conversation, Bishop speaks of ecological responsibility, yet her work isn’t conventionally green. There are no explicit anti-pollution or anti-global warming instructions in her paintings and sculpture, no specific us-against-them politics and, thankfully, little holier-than-thou sanctimony. Bishop’s works aren’t warnings, they’re surreal death notices — the sensitive, artistic equivalent of Mad Max movies.

For all their beauty, Bishop’s paintings are more than a bit grim. The smoky skies, charred birds, bloodied anthropomorphic orchids, and huddled masses of monkeys, bugs and other jungle denizens are violently elegiac. In Bishop’s view, the grim reaper has already come and gone and all that’s left is the wreckage of once-splendid flora and fauna — and a sense of regret.

The title of the show “Trespass” expresses Bishop”s regret that modern man has become a stranger in parts of his own home.

“Ecology is the way we feel in our environment,” she said. “Are we aware? . . .

“We’re all trespassers . . . Not that we don’t belong. We all belong here, we’re part of the ecology, we’re organisms, we’re part of the natural world. But we’ve also been disconnected with the natural world.

“I feel this more when I go to a nonhuman landscape (such as the Brazilian rain forest). Then, I feel that I am encroaching, even though I clean up everything after myself and make it look like nobody was there. I think that maybe we could be more sensitive about the impact we have everyday when we get up — it doesn’t have to be in a nonhuman place.”

Man’s disconnect from the environment may have inspired the title “Trespass,” but the best (and most forlorn) part of the exhibit is a direct symbolic connection between humans and their shrinking world. The collection of pairs of painted children’s shoes (many found during the artist’s travels), hung at child’s-eye-view in the rear galleries are poignant in the extreme. By combining images of Earth’s fragile, shrinking wilderness with the sense of loss that discarded children”s shoes embody, Bishop has achieved a stunning visual dirge.

“Childhood is temporary,” Bishop said, “and then it’s over.”

Jacqueline Bishop : Trespass

Through April

Arthur Roger Gallery, 432 Julia St., 522-1999