Feeling a place in your bones

We humans work hard to make places our own, but we don’t often consider the way places make us theirs. Internalized Landscapes: I can feel this place in my bones, at Newport’s Overlap Art Space through August 29, does.

It fits the moment. As the planet heats, attention to the earth’s living spirit grows more urgent. Indigenous cosmologies, eco-feminism and queer ecology espouse an end to the human-constructed hierarchy that puts white men at the top. We must listen to and partner with our biospheres to survive. No longer can we paternalistically gaze over fields like the lord of the manor and paint them. We have to own ourselves in order to give up owning everything around us.

Artists in Internalized Landscapes, curated by Alicia Renadette, blow apart hoary old systems of order to reveal great rivers of external and internal life with currents of history, heart, science, and environment converging in every individual and in every community. I didn’t anticipate that the show would also blow apart my own little orderly approach to art reviewing – but I’ll get to that.

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Those inner and outer currents come together in the dream world of Alex Callender’s deeply researched paintings in the Night Grass series. Alex draws on historic records of the slave trade such as merchant ledgers, connecting trade and banking in the Northeast to Caribbean slave societies with imagery resembling colonial indigo textiles or blue tarpaulins – and settling it all on the familiar, sensual territory of grass.

Pale disembodied hands hold that old/ new blue fabric as if pegging down a ghostly tent on a dark lawn in The settler state wandered, looking to make new borders but the rising water washed all the lines away and there was nowhere else to go. A technical diagram glows out from the center and bright botanical drawings float in water below. The hands seem desperate to stake a claim but helpless to do it in the face of change. That converging river of inner and outer? It’s change, too. We’re all in it, like it or not.