Ringling exhibit reveals the beauty and terror of nature

“Michele Oka Doner: The True Story of Eve” is a garden of earthly (and unearthly) delights at The Ringling. The artist who cultivates that garden celebrates nature, without a hint of sentimentality. Oka Doner’s art is an explosion of the life force, not some peaceable Eden.

The nature she reveals is wildly beautiful, often dangerous. The Florida-born artist is a force of nature herself. With “Galaxy” and “A Walk on the Beach,” she captured the stars and the sands in the title floors at Miami International Airport. Her artistic mediums include sculpture, hand-pulled prints, drawings, video, and the printed word. However Oka Doner expresses herself, nature is the eye of her storm. Her work in this exhibition brings your right to the heart of it.

Oka Doner’s “A Seed Sprouted” (2021) is a massive print of a rust-colored, spiral vortex. (Her rusty medium is iron oxide on handmade paper.) What you’re looking at is a tree ring, the cross-section of a pine tree at Archbold Biological Station in Venus, Florida. According to the text below the image, that pine took root in 1941. It sprouted on a limestone ridge – the so-called “backbone of Florida.” In the years that followed, it survived a fire, a head-on vehicle crash, and blue stain fungus. But nothing lasts forever. The tough old pine was finally felled in 2009. In an image of swirling energy, Oka Doner captures the concentric circles marking the years of the tree’s life.

“Nacre” (2018) is a dense drawing of some enigmatic aggregation. Rows of dark diagonal ridges interspersed with shiny shapes like so many circular glass bricks. Towering, alien architecture was my first impression. But nature is actually the architect; this structure is actually tiny. (Fun fact: “Nacre” means “mother of pearl.”) The artist based this image on a grainy photomicrograph of a nautilus from 1920. The cephalopod’s cell structure is fascinating at this scale. Oka Doner took a few artistic liberties and made it more fascinating.

“Coercion,” (2019) is a print of some shattered male figure. He seems to be made of tree bark. That’s because he is. Oka Doner was touring an old quarry near the Hudson River one day. The hemlocks around her were dying. Where most people would see decay, she saw art supplies. The artist picked up some hemlock bark, put it in a trash bag, took it back to her studio, sprayed it with Lysol, stepped on it, flattened it, dried it, and sent the material to an 8-foot press in St. Louis, Missouri. She used that press to make this print.

The artist inked “Adam from Roots” (2007) from the roots of a banyan tree. The primordial figure looks like a thundercloud come to life. Or a cloud chamber shot through with the tracks of high-energy particles. And this stormy Adam isn’t alone. He’s accompanied by a second Adam – “Birth of Adam” (2007), a print from the same series. But where’s Eve? “The True Story of Eve” is the exhibition’s title, after all. But images of Eve are curiously missing. Her true story seems to be missing, too. (As far as I can tell, her two Adams have all their ribs.)

Curator Ola Wlusek did stunning work in this exhibition. Her selections pull you into the artist’s wild world. This show’s like a walk through a haunted forest. But its elusive story resists sharp definitions.

There’s a sacred quality to Oka Doner’s work – and also a sense of mystery. My interpretations here are free-associations. I’m not trying to decode her art. I’ll just let the mystery be.

What does Oka Doner’s art mean? That’s up to you.

How does she make it? That’s not a mystery.

At last count, her art supplies in these pieces include tree bark, iron oxide, and the roots of tough Miami banyan tree that survived Hurricane Ida. Nature’s both her medium and message.

Oka Doner’s art is about nature – and she makes it from natural stuff. It’s a cool idea, even if the Neolithic cave painters thought of it first. And it might be an idea whose time has come.

If a solar flare ever wiped out modern civilization, Oka Doner could still find art supplies.

That’s a cool idea, too.

‘Michele Oka Doner: The True Story of Eve’

Through June 2, at The Ringling’s Monda Gallery, 5401 Bay Shore Rd., Sarasota. 941-359-5700; ringling.orghttps://www.ringling.org

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Ringling highlights a force of nature with Michele Oka Doner exhibit