By Amanda Estes

Staff Writer    

Andy Rosen’s fantastical mixed media sculptures – displayed among Scott
Listfield’s oil painting depicting a dinosaur and lion simultaneously
roaming the streets in front of a graffiti covered Guggenheim Museum
and Joshua R. Marks’ installation piece consisting of a tiny suburban
landscape encased in glass domes – offer fodder for imaginative minds
capable of creating the absurd or the unusual from commonplace objects.

The South Portland resident’s sculptures are currently on display in
Whitney Art Works’ exhibition, “After the End of the World,” a
multi-artist show offering aspects of both the strange and the
familiar. The exhibit will run until Nov. 3 with an artist reception
from 5 to 8 p.m. on Oct. 5.

Curator Jeff Badger said each artist offers a perspective of “a time or
place that exists after the end of what we perceive as our world –
broach[ing] this subject through different media, imagery and with a
distinct emotional perspective, varying from epic to clinical to
humorous.”  

In his latest work, Rosen mashes bits of the familiar together to form “rural constructions.”

“I’m really interested in using whatever’s lying around,” Rosen said
during a recent interview at Whitney Art Works’ Congress Street
gallery. Rosen’s latest work incorporates materials such as driftwood,
concrete, foam, paper mache, hot glue and even part of an old screen
porch.

Pointing to a sculpture entitled, “everything’s slowing down,” which is
suspended from the gallery’s ceiling, Rosen offered insight into his
creative process. The sculpture depicts an owl, made from bits of
concrete, carrying the burden of a mountain on its outstretched wings.
Rosen said he made the owl first and it had been hanging around in his
studio for some time when he began constructing the mountain. Without
any prior intent to put the two elements together, Rosen said he “just
kind of smashed them together.”

The results are physical representations of Rosen’s musings on struggle
and what it means to live in the world. His work embodies an aspect of
folklore that he believes most people can relate to in some way. In his
stories, animals stand in for humans. “You’re breaking up,” depicts a
ship balancing vicariously on a curling wave. Underneath the wave, a
beaver appears to be bracing himself against the impending crash.  

Rosen’s interests have changed since his art school days when he was
focused on glass blowing and painting. He received a bachelor of fine
arts from Alfred University in New York and a master of fine arts
degree in painting and drawing from The University of Iowa.

“Glassblowing is a really expensive operation,” he said. “It certainly
changed what people made [and] how often you got to do it.”

Rosen found inspiration in rural art forms such as taxidermy and whittling.

“I certainly respond to where I am,” he said. “I think it’s pretty
strange that we stuff animals [and] why is whittling so popular?”

His  “vegan” stuffed animals, constructed from various materials,
represent creation as a way of understanding. As an adjunct art
instructor at the University of New England in Biddeford, he encourages
his students to do the same.

“I think it’s important to even attempt to understand something by trying to recreate it,” he said.

Rosen said he showed the class a video about some of mankind’s first
artists who used cave walls as canvases on which to capture their
hallucinations. He said the paintings often depicted large beasts such
as wooly mammoths, possibly as a way of paying homage.  

While Rosen said taxidermy might also be a way of paying homage to the
animals, he sees in his work references to Native American totems in
which animals serve as spirit guides.

The sculpture, “I can only take you so far,” depicts either a struggle
or cooperation (Rosen prefers to leave it open ended) between a wolf
and the broken ship he carries on his back. While the wolf seems to be
struggling to go any further with the weight of the ship on his back,
Rosen suggests maybe it is the boat that can only carry the wolf so
far.   

Although the characters may look different today, Rosen said he has
always been interested in how the struggle plays out. As a child, Rosen
recalled “posing action figures out in the landscape,” where the tiny
figures faced various dramas of his making.

“I think it’s kind of hard to quantify what this is,” Rosen said,
surveying the exhibit. “A lot of these things exist in my imagination.”

Despite the exhibit’s title, Badger said the show isn’t about artists with apocalyptic visions.

“None of this work ostensibly is about the end of the world, but when
you put them all together, that’s a thread that ties them all
together,” Badger said.

He said, as a curator, he projects his own ideas on the works, but said
each artist offers a perspective of what the end of the human world
might look like.

“It’s the end of our world – nature will continue on whether we’re here or not,” Badger said.

Translated from the original Greek, Badger said the word apocalypse
means, “the lifting of the veil.” In a biblical sense, Rosen said the
apocalypse is a “contemporary horror story,” but the larger fear today
seems to be that humans will be responsible for ruining their own world.

“I really like the notion of – something we’ve done kind of growing
over,” Rosen said, adding that nature’s resurgence after humans are
gone isn’t a pessimistic view of the world’s end.

For more information about, “After the End of the World” or Whitney Art
Works, visit www.whitneyartworks.com. Gallery hours are 12 to 6 p.m.
Wednesday through Saturday, or by appointment. The exhibit is located
at 492 Congress Street in Portland.