Portraits of the Divine 

 

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​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 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. 

Amassed in the center of the gallery, like spoils of war, the installation Ivory functions as  the visual anchor of the exhibition. Ivory is a pile of glass-blown tusks laid to rest on a  monumental slab of ancient Douglas fir. Accompanying the tusks, portraits of imperiled  fauna 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. Ivory is more than a  mere reflection on the devastating effects of the global trade in illegal 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.

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Museum of Northwest Art