The Art of Extraction

Art exhibitions that try to reckon with humanity’s ever-deepening impact on the environment tend to take one of two approaches: they present either a moralizing suite of ecological horrors or a feel-good tour of a possible greener future. “Sentient Earth,” at the nonprofit exhibition space Amant in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, does neither. Instead the show offers a bracing survey of the many meanings that humans find in what they take from their environment. These are evident in the Surrealist jungle scenes of Hélio Melo, a self-taught artist and rubber tapper who painted with pigments he made from Amazonian plants, as well as in Ignacio Gatica’s LED-screen sunsets, with angular horizons that double as real-time graphs of changing prices for commodities such as copper and oil. The curators tease the hypothesis that the earth is a conscious thing full of feedback mechanisms. This is not a warm and fuzzy picture but a hard look at how human behaviors reverberate through the planet’s systems in unexpected, even biocidal ways.A grid of black-and-white pictures of rickety wooden coal-mining equipment by the German conceptual photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher is mute on the deleterio...