Alexis Rockman at Jay Gorney

Art in America, Feb, 1998 by Grady T. Turner

Looking at Alexis Rockman's recent work, it is easy to imagine the artist as a young boy standing before the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, gradually realizing that nature can be reconstructed in fictional narratives. Now, after years of contemplating the museum's authoritative vignettes, Rockman mimics them in "Dioramas," an exhibition of kitschy tableaux that combine trompe-l'oeil painting with digitized photographs, trash, clothing, animal carcasses and a variety of other artifacts, all preserved under several inches of resin. In these 1997 works he depicts the natural world's adaptive struggles in environments altered by intrusions such as suburbs, airports and highways, not to mention tourism by nature-lovers like himself.

The Rec-Room (48 by 40 by 3 3/4 inches) depicts the nasty business behind the faux-wood paneling of a suburban residential interior as a squirrel and mouse copulate in a nest feathered with insulation and shredded currency. The foreground is a sheet of paneling, complete with an electrical outlet and a framed print in which three dogs are shown playing poker. A cutout in the paneling allows a view into the rodents' nest, the dimensionality of which is astonishing. Through a hole that appears to have been chewed in the outside wall at the back of the nest, a church steeple is seen in the distance. But the busy rodents are oblivious to human notions like sin, as much as they are to the termites eating at the house's structure.

Still, in this contest, nature clearly is at a disadvantage. Another "Diorama" puts us on a painted desert highway disappearing into a Monument Valley sunset. The vista is marred by a Frankensteinian roadkill in the foreground (pieces of dead animals under the resin). The mishap has occurred near a sign warning drivers to brake for jackalopes, a mythic Western hybrid of rabbit and antelope. In another work, a true hybrid, the mule, is propped up by a barn wall hung with S&M paraphernalia, her rump branded and her front legs replaced by a metal crutch.

Rockman does not exempt himself from corruption: in The Ecotourist he depicts his own rotting corpse; tiny parasites share his flesh with seedlings and birds of prey. An enlargement of a microscope view and a helpful diagram mounted under the resin identify the actors in his putrefaction. While mammals have long provided meat for predators in museum dioramas, it is startling to encounter human death as a matter-of-fact element in natural history's familiar cycle of life. Perhaps the rethinking of dioramas in Rockman's work -- as well as in that of Mark Dion and Gregory Crewdson -- will have an impact on the institutions that formed these artists' views of nature.