Labour Love celebrates like-minded artists in 'Naturally Selected'

Labour Love Gallery’s exhibition Naturally Selected thoughtfully pieces together a collection of artists who seem to share the owners’ affinity for the tender. The gallery itself feels cherished and sincere, and the displayed artists seem to be careful seekers of beauty and observers of the natural world.

Pamela Zimmerman wraps the dark browns of hardbody gourds in silvery barks or soft, yellow pine needles. One resembles a shell, lined inside its cool hardness with delicate pink iridescent paper. A fiber artist, she also coils horse hair around carved wooden moon faces.

Jenny Hodges’ works resemble encyclopedic tapestries that might be used to teach natural science classes to extraterrestrials. In her piece “Home 2,” she cocoons acorns, seashells and seedpods behind mesh nets hand-stitched into felt. The mesh obscures these objects lightly, forcing the viewer to peer closely and really examine what lies behind it. Up close, the strangeness of nature’s burrs and seeds is delightful; you’re glad Hodges made you look.

Edgier and more bizarre than Hodges’ or Zimmerman’s work, Emily Soldin Howard’s creations focus on the interplay between food and memory. “Avgolemono” is a piece done on distressed, stained and decomposing fabric that centers around the cooking of a hen. Howard uses mostly wax and plaster, mediums that work particularly well for this piece because they maintain the characteristics of beaten yolks or raw chicken. It’s done in mottled tans, whites and yellows and the wax looks sinewy. An old-fashioned recipe, complete with sketches of the hen being prepared, is digitally printed over the canvas.

Joshua Parker Coombs adds further variety to the collection by moving the display from the walls to the floor where his steel, stone and rust sculptures stand (an achievement in itself) tribute to inspiration. Behind them are the paintings he created by overlapping painted sheep from a sheep-shaped cookie cutter on top of wood panels. In greens and blues, they resemble oceanic cartography and in steely, mineral colors they become a map of the earth.

Finally, Destry Sparks expands the exhibition by concentrating on less traditionally beautiful forms of nature, pulling in motifs of outer space and the southwest and utilizing materials as diverse as deer bones and dead amphibians. In “Ascension,” he frames a burlap canvas with an old window frame and creates a nightmarish acid rainstorm inside of it. The burlap pollutes his red, yellows and greens and his white paint stands out like stars. Floating in his trippy atmosphere are materials as diverse as bottle caps, rope, snake skin, twist ties and paper cone cups. Their overall effect is stunning, not a sermon against pollution. It’s only careful examination of detail that reveals garbage.

The collection coheres through the artists’ admirable uncovering of curious details. Their energy rejuvenates a desire to get closer, look harder and create.