Pennsylvania artists Diane Burko and Rebecca Kamen are in the tradition of classical and Renaissance polymaths who combined art-making with studying the natural world. Many things have changed since those eras of intellectual discovery, but the most significant one is the world itself. Its resources and possibilities can no longer be considered infinite.
That’s why Burko and Kamen, who have shows in adjacent galleries at the American University Museum, depict loss, decay and looming menace. Burko’s expansive “Seeing Climate Change” features paintings and photographs of melting glaciers and bleaching corals. Kamen’s smaller “Reveal: The Art of Reimagining Scientific Discovery” includes a wall covered with sculptures of massively enlarged viral spores.
Burko studied art in the 1960s, and learned to paint in the then-dominant abstract style. But she was drawn to landscape, a traditional subject she came to adapt for an untraditional purpose. Beginning in 2006, she began documenting a warming Earth in various modes and media. “I can’t keep making paintings about the landscape I love without trying to do something about it,” she explains in an interview excerpted in the show’s catalogue.
Although much of the artist’s work is realistic, some is nearly abstract or multilayered, combining pictures with geographic or scientific information. In addition to paintings and photos, the show includes round lenticular prints (made with Anna Tas) whose swirling, seemingly liquid images change as the viewer’s perspective does. It’s as if Burko found the globe’s environmental shifts too complex to show — or see — in just one way.
