Featuring works by Walter Brown, Jai Hart, Greg Jenkins, Benjamin King, Jon Lutz, Sasha Parks, Jen Shepard, Bert Yarborough, and Becky Yazdan, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (and Cape Cod) partly takes its cue from the 1943 novel by Betty Smith. Just as in Smith’s novel where a tree growing outside a tenement building comes to symbolize resilience and hope, the paintings on view here reflect the tenacity of the natural world as much as the indomitable will of the human spirit. Taken as a whole, the exhibition showcases our interconnectedness with nature, and how fostering a sense of community can instill a greater awareness of our essential bond with the earth and the surrounding cosmos. 

Another theme running through the exhibition is that the ideology of isolated individualism, fostered by industrialization and technocentrism, is inadequate to the sheer “experience of experience.” The sort of manual labor that goes into the facture of a painting, the imagery cast onto its material substrate, maps out a kind of cerebral rhythm—patterned echoes that trace out how our nervous system both answers to and asks after essential features of the natural world. Walter Brown’s frenzied work, Disruption Chaos Uncertainty (2024), for instance, offers a pointillistic swirl of colors that could be seen as an aerial view of a landscape with hills and valleys and rivers traceable through it, or a cell sample beneath a microscope. Indeed, Brown’s previous career as a medical doctor informs much of the vision behind his practice, highlighting the ways the interior workings of the human body mirror those of the exterior natural world. 

Works by other artists on view, such as those by Jai Hart and Ben King, offer a more direct view of our relationship with nature. King, in particular, highlights the medium-specificity of paint, and shows how daubs of acrylic (a plastic material) can analogically correspond to the flowerings of buds and leafy outgrowths generally. In one recent work, SB (2024), the vista represented acts like a window, a corrective lens through which we can perceive our continuity with celestial bodies encompassing us on all sides. Jai Hart’s mixed-media works, for their part blend brightly colored landscapes with sculptural aspects that thrive in situ. Like King, she showcases how natural and manmade forms can come into correspondence. Only here the framing analogy is less like a window, and more like an embrace, realizing a union between the physical body and the perceived environment.

The varied approaches of the artists featured in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (and Cape Cod) take micro- and macro-views of the natural world, breaking it down into its component parts or expanding upon it to the brink of illegibility. However abstract a work might become, it stays grounded by the movement of natural cycles, whether tellurian or celestial. Across this attentiveness to cosmic patterns and uniformities, a new pictorial language emerges:  cipher-script equally hieroglyphic and naturalistic, diagrammatic and symbolic. Through the expressionistic vision, the importance of personal bonds, of connection as much as sacrifice, shines through, allowing us to reevaluate our relationship with nature in novel and striking ways.