There’s a proliferation of animal imagery in contemporary art, and Karri Paul’s solo show at the AT&T Center’s Courtyard Gallery, compose     project     this   image, offers yet another exploration of the popular subject. Both an artist and writer, here Paul puts forth a visually rewarding set of drawings. The exhibition’s title comes from a line in one of Paul’s poems, encouraging viewers to consider the works in the context of her dual vocations. Even the arrangement of the works—clustered in small and stark groups along the wall—suggests stanzas, though this is perhaps largely due to the linear reading imposed by the Courtyard Gallery’s long and narrow space.

Karri Paul, Landscape with Wasps' Nest, 2010; graphite on paper; 24 x 8";
courtesy the artist and AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center Courtyard Gallery.

Most of the works on view are landscapes, according to their titles, but the works are more complex than this designation suggests. The compositions are layered and ambiguous. The animal forms that populate the fractured scenes are at times highly naturalistic and detailed, while at other times they appear skillfully conflated with the craggy physical elements of their surroundings. In Landscape with Wasps’ Nest (2010), it’s difficult at first glance to distinguish the wasp from its nest at the top of the frame. Paul drew creature and environment with equal weight, producing a bold macroscopic view that comes into focus just as a gaping void of negative space interrupts it. The exposed white page simultaneously fragments and unifies the composition; as a transitional device it suggests a conscious reassembling of information.

At their most successful the works encapsulate the beauty and violence of nature. Nowhere does the artist more explicitly pair these attributes than in Landscape with Dogs (2010). Large and snarling canine mandibles arc menacingly downward towards a lone leaping deer gracefully highlighted against a dense forest. The deer appears fragile and ethereal under the weight of the powerful jaws that dominate the composition. Paul’s mark-making echoes this dichotomy, alternately forceful and exquisitely delicate. Upon close inspection, even the drawing’s deep blacks reveal a rich layering of varied line work. Like the shades of meaning that emerge from an oft-read poem, the works are better appreciated with repeated viewing.

Karri Paul, Landscape with Geese Taking Flight, 2009; colored pencil on paper; 9 x 9"; courtesy the artist and AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center Courtyard Gallery.

Though nature is the exhibition’s predominant subject, evidence of human civilization surfaces intermittently throughout the works: here a plowed field, here a tiny cityscape protruding from behind a magnified flower’s bloom. These intrusions, often jutting into negative space, appear minimized yet ominous amidst the natural imagery. Paul addresses human presence somewhat differently, however, in Landscape with Geese Taking Flight (2009), perhaps the most visually straightforward work on display. Void of the spatial ambiguity so present in the other works, in this landscape the rocky backdrop unmistakably takes the form of a human skull. Along with the drawing’s muted red tone and the textural quality of its line and shadow, the imagery reminds of an aged memento mori etching.1 One of the only colored pencil drawings in the show—most are graphite on paper—the small work occupies a central position on the wall. Set so distinctly, the drawing invites comparison to the other drawings. Its didactic reminder of mortality lends a benign quality to the man-made structures that appear in other works and incorporates humanity into the scope of natural, albeit reconstructed, landscapes.

I’ll admit that I amused myself comparing Landscape with Geese Taking Flight to Landscape with Raccoon Skull—which by association I construed as an animal-version memento mori—but this has more to do with a desire to inject a bit of humor into the exhibition than artistic intent or analytical validity. Truthfully, though, the overall gravitas of the exhibition seems appropriate in the context of a very real natural world in chaos. This isn’t to assume that the artist is an ecological crusader, but it is refreshing to see a more subdued take on a subject so often treated with kitsch or irony. The works rely on their visual complexity to hold interest, and in this they succeed.

• 1. For an example and a brief explanation of the memento mori tradition, see the British Museum’s page on Jean Morin’s seventeenth-century etching. Many traditional memento mori works contain imagery signifying the passage of time and earthly life’s transitory nature; in Paul’s work the geese preparing to fly out of the frame serve this interpretation.