The title curator Alex Glauber bestowed on this terrific show is a line from a 1994 Phish song, “Wolfman’s Brother”:
The telephone was ringing
That’s when I handed it to Liz
She said, “This isn’t who it would be
If it wasn’t who it is”
Charrière’s current ambit is diametrically opposed to the preservationist idea of nature articulated by the American Transcendentalists and neo-Luddites. This is not to say pessimism has won over. The exhibition prods at the ritualistic relationship between man and nature, veering closer to the ideas of the nineteenth-century German Romantics than those of current, activist environmentalists.