Focusing on humanity’s never-simple relationship with the natural world, Joanna Malinoswka’s show draws on literary and other sources to explore how culture and the wider physical world find themselves so frequently at odds. Fans of Thomas Bernhard will appreciate a set of watercolors illustrating an episode from the author’s novel The Loser, in which pianist Glenn Gould chops down a tree that is distracting him rather than simply drawing the curtains. Elsewhere, a shredded copy of The Brothers Karamazov cheekily reduces a monumental work of fiction to something one might stumble over during a walk in the woods.
Trees appear again in Still Life, a free-form installation of Christmas tree carcasses based—loosely—on a beaver habitat. To the base of this desiccated stack, Malinowska has added the supine figure of a personal hero, Dada kingpin Hugo Ball. It’s an intriguing juxtaposition, but somehow the work doesn’t lodge in the memory quite as well as the artist’s smaller sculptural works, which include a spindly clothes horse modeled in dark wood and a set of primitive-looking weapons produced in response to Albert Einstein’s wry vision of a potential World War IV. Although these and other works give the show a sparse, wintry look, there’s plenty going on beneath its austere surface.