Art review: Animal kingdom subject of fear, fascination in exhibit

Bottom line: There’s something ugly beneath the abundant cuteness in Laura Bell’s enchanted animal kingdom.

How much does artist Laura Bell love the animal kingdom?

Well, she loves it enough to paint adorable portraits of chipmunks posed like European royalty and displayed in ornate black frames.

She loves it enough to dangle flowers and beads and jewels from a boar’s fur in her drawing “Root (Boar).” The animal’s snaggletooth snarl and crinkled snout suddenly look less threatening and more endearing when you take in the tiny bird’s nests, delicate flowers and ropes of beads ornamenting the animal’s fur as if the creature were an allegory for nature itself.

Nature both adored and treated like an endlessly renewable and exploited resource is part of the crux of Bell’s solo show at Whitespace Gallery, “Run Rampant,” an exhibition that highlights our strange, often troubling relationship to the natural world which inspires both fear and fascination, a desire to protect but also our human impulse to exploit, a contradictory desire to revere and debase.

“Run Rampant” is an expression of reverence mixed with a certain degree of wistful sadness and a touch of the macabre. Mixing art nouveau, psychedelia and taxonomy, Bell has created a visually rich and imaginative paean to nature, both its cuddly human favorites like bunnies and deer and its reviled lower-rent occupant rats and opossums. Nature itself is a compromised state, as seen in works like “The Travelers (Geese),” a typically rich-with-detail pen and ink drawing of two geese in twinned gestures with wings outstretched, captured against an idyllic backdrop of water and trees.

Look closely at Bell’s nature studies, and the delicately drawn landscape of water and foliage has often been marred by Styrofoam cups and beer cans littering the landscape, and the rude irony that Bell’s perfectly composed vision of an idealized nature has been compromised by human presence.

The exhibition proves most effective when, as in “Root (Boar)” in black ink on paper, the artist stays in a key of black and white, suggesting Victorian ornamentation or the anthropomorphic, furry heroes of storybooks. Like an old movie tinted for modern tastes, the series of bugs under glass that resemble desktop paperweights done in lurid colors and described with their Latin taxonomic names take the natural world out of the realm of dreams and allegory into a more realistic, less imaginative and less romantic place.

An implicit assertion of the show is if you love nature, you have to love the whole kit and caboodle, from slugs to cute furry mammals, from newborn bunnies to the animal skulls displayed or represented in “Run Rampant” that signal cutenesses end. Bell’s exquisite, ornate wallpaper “Urban Bestiary” says as much, with its cameos of moles and deer and opossum presented in a living room setting that suggests all of the natural world repressed in the human realm, brought back in as decoration, trophy and prop.

Despite an often adorable effect, there are troubling assertions at work in “Run Rampant,” a sense that we keep our darkest impulses regarding nature a secret, even to ourselves.

If you had any doubt about the collision of life and death, preciousness and ickiness in “Run Rampant,” check out the takeaway rabbit’s feet displayed in a bowl at the gallery’s entrance. It’s a strange human custom and assertion of our conflicted relationship to nature that a totem of good luck is also a dead animal’s paw.