Ely Center Strikes A Climate Nerve

A sculpture made of recycled materials. A painting of the trees outside of an apartment building that are usually part of the background. A suit you can float on.

These things are part of two different art exhibits — What Surrounds and Ready Famliar — that speak to each other in interesting ways. Both are currently on view at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street until Nov. 10.

What Surrounds features artists from Art Shape Mammoth, a group that describes itself as ​“a creative community that cultivates radical societal transformation by supporting and performing activities that promote social justice, education, and environmental sustainability.” What Surrounds itself seeks to ​“explore the multi-faceted concept of our environment and the many ways we experience its influence on our lives.” The work of artists Rita Bard, Wendy Copp, Aimee Hertog, Maureen O’Leary, Fay Stanford, and Julie Ward is strong enough that the message comes through clearly even without knowing all this.

O’Leary’s contributions to the exhibit have the effect of turning traditional landscapes inside out. In a typical landscape that involves manmade things, there are often people in the foreground that draw the eye. Their houses are somewhere prominent, and the land unfolds around them. In O’Leary’s paintings, the people are nowhere to be found. Their buildings are obscured. It’s the dense foliage around the building that is the painting’s subject. O’Leary reminds us — somewhat like a planetarium or a trip up a mountain does — that humans and civilization are just a small part of the world around us. Though Aimee Hert’s sculptures of recycled materials point out that we’re not so small as to not have an effect on the planet.

What Surrounds is also notable for its playfulness. Rita Bard’s pieces, for example, have an off-kilter surreality to them that, like the other pieces in the exhibit, stay on message without being preachy about it.

And Julie Ann Ward’s work gets us to pay attention not only to the natural world we affect, but the way the things we make wear down, too. Her images of the pedals in her car bear the marks of her own shoes, the toll of miles upon miles of driving. Fossil fuels get burned. But the car that burns those fuels gets its marks, too. To its credit, the exhibit overall doesn’t specifically suggest making amends, or feeling the guilt that drives so much thought about the environment these days. It does suggest, however, that noticing the details, changing our perspective, may result in new ways of dealing with the problems of climate change and living sustainably.

Right next door to What Surrounds, Cori Champagne’s Ready Familiar exemplifies one of those new approaches. Much talk about the environment focuses on cars and houses — the energy sources we use to make them run, to heat and cool them, and the choices we can make to render our lifestyles more eco-friendly. Champagne takes it a step further.

“Clothing is our first home,” her artist statement reads. ​“It projects identity, produces comfort, offers protection. As the world imposes more and constant change, I create clothing for conditions no longer comfortably futuristic. Based on collected research, with an emphasis on the female participant, I create handmade apparel from readily available materials. Climate crises active in specific locations inform the priorities of each design and should remind us to wisely use any current advantage of safety.”

“Be ready,” the statement concludes.

Ready Familiar comes across almost as a sardonic fashion show. An outfit entitled Gulf/PR comes with its own flotation device and mask to filter out fumes. A handy pictogram wittily and chillingly suggests that this outfit is best used when your house floods; the pictogram suggests that it’s best used with the flotation noodles under you, so that you lie flat on your back, surfing the waves. Similarly, the outfit entitled Tsaile is designed for ​“desertification” situations. Diagrams show how someone could make the outfit for herself. ​“Use high thread count, keep out sand,” the instructions read. ​“Vest to stay tight to body in high wind. Hood completely covers head and face.”

The outfit Shishmaref, meanwhile, is intended for the opposite conditions. After all, we don’t know what will happen to any particular location as the overall temperature rises. Some places may become much cooler. Shishmaref, in fact, is complete with a small shelter that the wearer can drag behind her. A handy diagram explains that when the weather gets too cold, she can just climb into the shelter and, well, weather the storm.

The overall effect of Ready Familiar is a jarring mixture of funny and scary. It’s all too easy to begin imagining Champagne’s clothing and other ideas like it as entirely necessary to face whatever’s coming our way. When the exhibit explains that 10 Shismaref headgear are available for sale to benefit the organization Indigenous Climate Action, an indigenous climate justice organization, you might be forgiven for reaching involuntarily into your pocket — just to start doing something.