Margaret Curtis, “Pink Stripe,” 2021, oil on panel, 48 × 72 in.

“I think that if a song isn’t about something, it ought to be an instrumental.” With that advice, spoken often in concert, the great American jazz poet and performer Gil Scott-Heron, author of “Winter in America,” “Johannesburg,” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” never failed to bring his audience laughing and applauding to their feet. It was his expression of the sheer urgency that characterized the 1970s and ’80s. Now, the surprisingly complete vision of Margaret Curtis, currently on view as This, too, in the Street Gallery at UMOCA, likewise conveys an artist’s sense that the challenges we  face today preclude her from applying her skills to a less imperative or more cozy task.

Curtis clearly wants her audience to share her discomfort with the environmental catastrophe of global warming, extinction of whole species, and the gender divide that sees male politicians and corporate profiteers, or those who mimic male behavior, making all the wrong choices, so that the pregnant woman in her “Pink Stripe,” carrying another baby on her back as she picks her way barefooted along a path of veneer panels laid down over a rock-strewn desert floor, becomes not just the bearer of new life, but the carrier of all the obvious alternatives, the right decisions that couldn’t be more apparent or more important, yet are nevertheless excluded from the discourse of those with the power to make real changes.

Paradox abounds in these 28 oil paintings, opaque watercolors, and graphite drawings. Has anyone ever painted fake woodgrain more meticulously? Or applied her skill so well to capturing our disintegrating, substitute nature: the ersatz plants and animals that comprise the lying facade of our urbanized world, behind which layer on layer of crumbling Earth can be seen to suffer. Two of her indelible tropes are fire consuming the manufactured world like so much kindling, and wallpaper, often decorated with the sylvan landscape that was destroyed when a replacement was built, peeling away to expose concealed layers of material fabrication. Perhaps her most eloquent passages occur when fire brings ornamental vignettes of trees and birds to life, even as they are burning to ash, some of which she has gathered from wildfires to add to her pigments.

Installation view of Margaret Curtis’ “This, too” at UMOCA, with, from left, “The Forest Was Rebuilt,” “Portrait of My Anxiety (Burning Wallpaper),” a quartet of works on paper, and “Nature Morte.” Image courtesy of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art

Many of the false surfaces Curtis renders, only to rip them away, make witty references that underscore the incomparable wisdom of her feminist intelligence. In “Self Made Man,” she invokes the hubris of successful individuals who apparently believe, and do not hesitate to assert, that their success owes nothing to the total efforts of an entire species, but rather belongs to them alone. Amid the many hints, including the echo of the subject’s striped trousers in the parched, parquet soil on which he stands, one that stands out is a neon “OPEN” sign—as in “for Business”—that, seen from the other side reads NEPO with a backwards letter P. Short for nepotism, “nepo,” and especially “nepo-baby,” are now the popular dismissals of such fatuous self-aggrandizement.

If that judgment seems too finely targeted, compare the encompassing anger of “The Forest Was Rebuilt,” one of the ash paintings. Here, as the fires still burn in the background, an entire grove of faux trees, cut from slabs of veneer, takes the forest’s place. Anyone who has seen the great Northwest forests that have been clear-cut, leaving only a scrim of trees along the road to hide the carnage, then indifferently replanted, can share the artist’s fury.

It should come as no surprise, given such a frank, even passionate view of the human condition, writ large, to find more specific, even intimate perspectives nearby. Two close-up, yet metaphorical views are “Emotional Cartography IV,” and  the pseudo-biblically titled “They prayed for rain and God gave them Rope.” In the former, the figure of a woman representing fertility writhes within a coil of coded energy that emerges from her own body, only to have it attack her in the form of fire. In the latter work, less about the natural dilemma and more focused on human agency, an appeal to an outside savior brings only the means to hang ourselves with dalliance and delay.

Margaret Curtis, “They Prayed” (left) and “Emotional Cartography” (right)

Margaret Curtis, “Collapse,” 2022, oil on panel, 60 × 60 in.

For this viewer, two works best display the achievement of Margaret Curtis. One is “Collapse,” wherein a sunset like a nuclear holocaust can be seen through a cinematic stage set, or something akin to a commercial billboard, that is collapsing onto a vast parquet floor the colors of crops and soil. As in other places, an entire vocabulary of graphic representation has been made to call out the artificial quality of what now substitutes for real life. The other, “Nature Morte: Study in White,” borrows the more brutal term for Still Life for use in a trompe l’oeil—another French term of representational art—canvas in which an unfinished paint-by-number forest scene that brings Bambi and his mother to mind is menaced by a fire burning the wall behind. Other elements include a ceramic gamecock, an empty portrait frame for a missing person, a postcard of Dürer’s rhinoceros, famous as proof that the artist never actually saw a real rhino but drew one from a fantastic description, and a green vase in which a few possibly real flowers remain, all in the pursuit of a bogus nostalgia her audience needs to realize we can no longer afford.

In This, too, Margaret Curtis has mobilized an encyclopedia of graphic representations and turned them into a thesaurus of natural and human-made, physical appearances, all in order to convey the degree to which the not-only-artificial, but fraudulent version of life on Earth that substitutes for the authentic experience now conceals the devastation of the real thing, degrading all life to an unsustainable level. To that end, the question is no longer can we bear to look at these images, but how can we afford not to hold them deep in our hearts. No less significant, she’s also given us an exciting and accurate language with which to appraise and negotiate our visible world.

Margaret Curtis, “Nature Morte: Study in White,” 2021, oil on panel, 48 x 60 in.

Margaret Curtis: This, too, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through Nov. 9

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.