‘Re-Wilding’ at Sara Nightingale Gallery

Sara Nightingale Gallery in Sag Harbor will present “Re-Wilding: JoAnne Carson & Suzanne Unrein,” opening Saturday, October 22, from 5 to 7 p.m. The exhibition will run through November 23.

For painters Carson and Unrein, nature is a verb. Both artists envision a dynamic and hybridized natural world, where animals and plants — both real and imagined — flourish against all odds.

The recent environmental conservation movement known as rewilding aims to return managed areas back to nature, eventually allowing wildlife and natural processes to take over without human intervention. Carson and Unrein, however, do not necessarily seek autonomy for their creatures, nor do they take an anti-human approach. Rather, by imbuing their subjects with anthropomorphic characteristics and emotions, they emphasize connectedness, empathy and intimacy with nature, even if their imagined universes are shape-shifting and wild.

“In Carson’s work, both flowers and trees take on strongly animistic properties,” writes Dan Cameron in his essay “A Return to Eden. “Their leaves, branches, stems and flowers bursting with kinetic exuberance, while the humans and animals who populate Unrein’s paintings seem to frolic in an orgiastic whirlwind of activity. Everything alive appears blissfully aware of its mutual interdependence on everything else.

Carson’s work has been shown extensively, including solo exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Zillman Art Museum in Bangor, Maine. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy in Rome Prix de Rome, an Award in the Visual Arts, and a purchase prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, amongst others. She currently splits her time between Brooklyn and Shoreham, Vermont.

Unrein’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S., including numerous solo shows. Unrein’s work was recently spotlighted in “The Oxford Handbook of Perceptual Organization” (Oxford University Press) and the focus of the short film, “Hands & Eyes,” that premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival. Her work is in the public collections of the Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation, Jersey City, N.J.; the U.S. Embassy, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Fish & Game, Hudson, N.Y. and the Kevin Richardson Wildlife Sanctuary, Pretoria, South Africa. Unrein is a California native and a current New Yorker.

Sara Nightingale Gallery is at 26 Main Street, Sag Harbor. For details visit saranightingale.com or call 631-793-2256.