The distillation of decades-long engagement of the artist with the impact of human beings on the natural world, Joseph Gregory Rossano: Portraits of the Divine is a compassionate tribute to nature. The exhibition features a selection of large-scale works from three of the artist’s ongoing series: At the Top of Her Lungs, Whitewashed, and Ivory. In each series, the artist invites the viewer to reflect on the divine oneness between humans and nature.

As an artistic category, the portrait has historically captured the likeness of a person to memorialize them. As an invocation to remember—memento!—portraits embody presence before the ultimate absence. By depicting a menagerie of animals whether endangered or already extinct, Rossano’s Portraits of the Divine manifest, like sacred icons, the holiness of nature, the immanence of a divinity on the brink of disappearing who looks back at us. Rossano’s Portraits of the Divine in fact look back. Like in a mirror, they return the gaze and engage the viewer face-to-face, in a reflection over the oneness of man and nature: by establishing a communion that strips down the artificial divide between nature and humans and reveals us, human beings, as a divinity capable of harm. 

Reflecting on forests as filtration systems essential to life on this planet, At the Top of Her Lungs is a series of drawings on repurposed wood pallets depicting a cast of wild animals struggling to inhale. The frontality of these portraits—their mouths wide open as they breathe deeply—evokes struggle more than confrontation, as it guides the viewer’s eyes into the cavernous mouths down to their lungs, burned by the acrid smoke of forest fires. At the Top of Her Lungs portrays nature as prostrated. Rossano’s mastery resides in the physical and emotional connection these figures establish with the viewer: we anxiously sense the air escaping our lungs, and feel the need to inhale deeply to dispel an oppressive sensation of suffocating. 

In the series Whitewashed each sculpture grows from a single large round of ancient Douglas fir. Reflecting on deforestation and loss of forests to fires in the new reality of climate change, the works are literally whitewashed. Cracked and drowned in white paint, the rounds of the tree evoke the retreating and fractured Arctic ice pack and the threat to the existence of the polar bear. As we fail to arrest the build-up of greenhouse gases and global warming, the bears' habitat also goes away. In its very title, the series Whitewashed holds us accountable for our delusion of concealment and lack of accountability.

​Ivory is a reflection on the devastating effects of the global trade in illegal ivory. Amassed in the center of the gallery, like spoils of war, a pile of glass-blown tusks is laid to rest on a monumental slab of ancient Douglas Fir. Accompanying the tusks, portraits of imperiled megafauna from the Holocene, our current geological epoch, and those extinct since the Pleistocene stalk the gallery walls.  Sensitively rendered in ash and tar on wood panels harvested from the very forests that have served as their homes for over 9,000 years, these creatures stare down at the viewer and the amassed ivory. More than any other work in the show, Ivory flashes before the viewer’s eye the conflicted interconnectedness of humans and nature: from prehistoric survival to contemporary greed, the tusks are all that is left of a vanishing creature. 

Like in a mirror, Rossano’s sculptures, drawings, and paintings in Portraits of the Divine function as two-way portraits: while they capture the likeness of nature’s creatures in their struggle for survival, they return the likeness of the human species, an unwilling divinity, in whose hands rests the fate of nature.