“Fire Danger Today! Prevent Wildfires,” alerts the sign at the entrance of the Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College. In lieu of rating the day’s level of fire danger from low to extreme, this sign carries the message: “I don’t want to talk about it.” Alternative plaques say, “Gestures broadly at everything” or “Well, it’s been worse.”
Raina Belleau, a professor at Rhodes, considers this piece, entitled Fire Danger, to be a pillar of her exhibition, “Enchanted Forest Fire,” through which she reflects on her climate anxiety. The messages on the plaques, she says, “are directly pulled from everyday phrases when we want to tell other people what a situation is like without causing alarm. These signs are scattered throughout the gallery to show that we’ve gone through these phases of denial or false reassurance [about climate change and environmental issues], and we are now in a place where we no longer lack the knowledge to have the conversation that needs to happen.” Instead, she suggests, we are unable to cope with our fears and realizations; we feel static, stuck between the choice to take accountability for the impacts of climate change we have caused as humans or to ignore them.
“One of the ways that I approach that sense of anxiety in the exhibition is through humor,” Belleau says. “I think humor is a way to open up some of these heavier subjects for discussion to acknowledge that there are feelings shared among a lot of different people in a lot of different places.” As such, Belleau took notes from some of the most widely familiar interpretations of nature — cartoons and fairy tales. “Like Disney, the way they use animal characters in children’s movies to elicit emotional responses.”
But unlike the classic Disneyfied, fairy-tale Enchanted Forest, the animals who inhabit Belleau’s exhibition are under a severe distress that evinces itself physically, distorting their bodily forms. The polar bear wears jeans, cuffed above his human ankles and two left human feet; he has no eyes, only sockets through which a disco-ball interior reflects light. The raccoon stares at her hand with eyes that swirl hypnotically and glow under black light as if under a drug-induced trance. A life-sized bear sits in a lawn chair, with crumpled silver cans lying around his feet, as exaggerated tears well up in his strained, cartoonish eyes. “He’s having a moment where he doesn’t know how to feel the emotions he’s having,” Belleau says. “He may be indulging in some less-than-healthy coping mechanisms.”
To sculpt the forms of these animals, Belleau turned to her preferred medium of found objects, particularly ones that are difficult to recycle, like single-use styrofoam coolers or the air packets that come in online shipping orders. However, unlike her usual style where these objects are recognizable — where the viewer can recognize that leaves, for instance, are made out of recycled plastic bags — these animals hide their recycled interior. “It was important for them to have some of that artificiality, like a cartoon character would, and not show what they are made of,” she says. “It’s been important for the work to reflect some of my personal commitments. That doesn’t necessarily have to be seen by the viewer, but that act is embedded in their cores quite literally.”
“There’s an element of escapism in movies, stories,” Belleau continues. “I think that visiting an art exhibition is also a form of escapism, but letting you enter this realm of the unreal or the imagined will never let you fully let go of what’s happening in the real world.”
“Enchanted Forest Fire” is on display at the Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College until October 16th. The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Vaccines and masks are required.