James Prosek’s ‘At Work’ exhibit at Morris Museum evokes the unfathomable mysteries of nature

James Prosek’s “Marble Trout” is part of his “At Work” exhibition at The Morris Museum in Morris Township.

James Prosek’s art often feels unnatural. This is peculiar because the stars of his works come straight from the natural world. Birds, fish, plants and warm-blooded mammals: These are the subjects of his meticulously rendered drawings, watercolors, silkscreen prints, sculptures and taxidermy pieces. When Prosek presents us with a trout, he makes sure to render the texture of the fins, the curve of its jaw, the set of its eyes and the markings on its scaly back with great fidelity to its real-life source. Once he’s got us on the line, he is quick as an angler to reel us in closer with specifics about the exact species of fish and exactly where in the world it came from.

What Prosek puts in his paintings tells us plenty about who he is, what he values, and how he sees the world. But his pieces are just as interesting for what they leave out. His beasts are rarely shown in a habitat. Instead, he presents them as a scientist would — bright, clear and fully exposed for inspection against a neutral-colored background. His animals are rarely occluded. Shadows do not tend to fall across their bodies. Unless they are themselves represented as shadows: silhouettes, flat as decals on canvases of white, crowding the field in great swarms of forms, fitted like a loose jigsaw puzzle, defying gravity, hardly interacting, never touching.

James Prosek’s “Sonoran Desert No. 1.”

It is a strange, beautiful, unnerving menagerie we are getting in “James Prosek: At Work,” an engrossing 30-year retrospective that will hang at The Morris Museum until June 8. The show, which spills out from the main exhibition galleries into adjacent rooms and the museum lobby, gathers momentum from chamber to chamber. By the time you are through, you will have a good idea about the complex things that this artist wants to communicate. Though Prosek is serious about anatomy and getting the shapes, colors and sizes of these animals right, his art isn’t really about capturing nature.

Instead, “At Work” is a hard and frequently unsparing look at the way we humans divide, classify and reduce the environment, that mammoth and unruly thing, into a hierarchy we can understand and exploit. These are animals as they exist in our minds — discrete entries at the ends of branches on a grand taxonomic tree, or laborers in a great corporate structure with a job assignment for each creature.

Nature, Prosek reminds us, doesn’t work like that. It is a continuous system that existed long before the botanists named the birds and the bees, and even longer before lepidopterists pinned insects to boards in order to better understand them.

Though Prosek’s touch is light, he can operate with the bluntness of a dedicated environmental crusader. In the silkscreen “Invisible Boundaries No. 2 (Texas),” he superimposes a red and white silhouette of a buffalo (and sprigs of prairie grass) over the Lone Star flag. The bars bisect the animal, dividing its bushy top from its hooves and genitalia. Prosek’s skill at rendering animals makes the buffalo winsome, but the point isn’t pretty. Wild things do not respect man-made geographical partitions. Our borders endanger them.

This is driven home with even greater emphasis in the neighboring “Invisible Boundaries No. 1,” a silkscreen depicting a circle of animals atop the Stars and Stripes. Instead of a field of stars, Prosek gives us a single angry-looking eagle in mid-flight, talons outstretched and pointed at a squirrel. Fauna has been rounded up, forced to live on a grid, and made subject to voracious American appetites.

Flora fares no better. An elegant representation in watercolor and gouache of Indian paintbrush, switchgrass and groundsel is divided over six panels. The frame is the scythe that cuts these stalks into pieces. Prosek’s assembly of images mimics the threshing force of our gaze — how we pull plants apart in segments in order to process them intellectually as well as physically. The artist is careful to bestow dignity on his subjects even as he chops them up.

James Prosek’s “Connecticut Composition No. 1.”

The grace of Prosek’s pictures of grasses extends to the work he is best known for: his massive arrays of hundreds of small silhouettes of animals, prowling, flying, standing still, all maintaining familiar postures with mere millimeters of white space between them. In “Connecticut Composition No. 1,” he surrounds a red-breasted robin with scores of New England shore creatures in solid black, including whales, turtles, egrets, squid, frogs, a fat tuna and at least one sandpiper with something tasty in its beak. It is at once a celebration of the diversity of animal life on the Atlantic seaboard and a comprehensive cataloguing of the natural world as it buzzes, swarms and flutters around us. To view it is to be overwhelmed by nature. Prosek dares us to wrap our minds around it and accept that no matter how we try to count it and weigh it, it will always be a mystery to us.

Sometimes he pushes this too far. Prosek’s taxidermy, made from roadkill, breaks with the realism of “At Work.” He has fitted stuffed birds with manufactured objects where their beaks should be: drill bits, saws, colored pencils. For an artist usually so careful to treat the animal kingdom with respect, it’s a jarring note. Many of these meetings of the organic and mechanical turn out to be visual puns based on the material-minded handles we have slapped on these once-living beings. It is a commentary on the carelessness of our anthropocentric naming conventions, but the rest of the show drives home the point in a far more deft manner. Much more effective — if just as creepy — is “Bird Spectrum,” a long inkjet print of hundreds of avian creatures, conked out, bodies belly-up, arranged by the shade of their plumage. Canaries, jays, orioles and cardinals are flipped over, weighed and described by the Peabody Museum at Yale University. Under harsh light, Prosek’s classification by color seems no more absurd than any other system.

Prosek shares the classical naturalist’s tolerance for carcasses. That is probably a prerequisite for anybody willing to get this close to the woods and the perpetual change it contains. At times, though, he seems curiously drawn to death. In the oil painting “Untitled (Extinct Carolina Parakeets),” he deals us a dozen birds, lifeless as bricks but still possessing lustrous starburst coloring, observed from different angles. A coroner could not ask for a more diagnostic investigation. His “Western Tanager” is toe-tagged, too. Presumably the many trout he has netted and captured in watercolor have long been removed from the water.

It is notable that the film contribution to “James Prosek: At Work” is a documentary devoted not to animals but to an angler. There is a hard, stark quality to this show that might be tough for an animal lover to stomach.

James Prosek’s “Swordfish.”

Yet Prosek’s distance from his beasts and his belief in their fundamental unknowability is also the show’s secret strength. Unusually — for an animal-fixated artist — he refuses to anthropomorphize his subjects in the slightest. We look at them, we classify and contain them, we identify with them, but they are not us, and he knows it.

This alterity is most apparent in the exhibition’s most sensational pieces: huge multimedia portraits of animal pairs, one large and one small, depicted together on panels as big as the footprint of an economy car. In the most arresting, we are confronted by a savage-looking “Swordfish” (harpooned in Nova Scotia, we are told), paired with a blade-wielding horseshoe crab with a body covered in spines and barnacles. Another matches a mammoth serrated-tooth shark with a tiny oyster that, in this context, seems utterly alien. There it sits next to the monstrous fish, an animate stone, chitinous and weird, unfriendly, utterly unlike you or me.

James Prosek’s “Self-Portrait as a Burned Log, with Branch of Cedar Elm.”

And there is the final lesson of “James Prosek: At Work”: The web of life is not cute. It is essential, and maybe even transcendent, but it is nothing we can throw our arms around. We pull these fish out of the water, cut the prairie grass, study the swallows, sort the mammals by clades and species, but none of that makes the great outdoors any warmer.

Our environmentalism, “At Work” teaches us, cannot depend on sentimentality. We must learn to respect and protect what is radically different from us, and we must do it without full, rational understanding. If we can’t manage that, we’re really for the birds.

The exhibition contains one human figure, and it is a self-portrait: a black bust carved out of a big, blasted piece of charcoal. Twigs and shoots grow from James Prosek’s scorched face. He has been touched by the forces of nature. They were overwhelming. But he knows what he doesn’t know, and secure in that absence of knowledge, he is ready to reach across the formidable gap between man and beast.

“James Prosek: At Work” will be at The Morris Museum in Morris Township through June 8; visit morrismuseum.org.

_________________________________________