Karin Pliem: “Symbiotic Unions”

Without bio-mass, molecular genetics, and costly research laboratories, Karin Pliem attempts to convey her ideas and perspectives concerning the problematic relationship between man and living nature.  By seducing the viewer into a massive landscape, replete with fantastical planting and vestiges of long past manufacture, She holds that man is neither more nor less than a part of nature. Symbiotic Union, Pliem’s first exhibition in the United States, invites us to enter a world of constructive communication between a polyculture society’s various living organisms. Although humankind is not depicted, we, as the viewer finalize the pictorial plane. There can be no doubt that the Artist’s views of nature are not naturalistic.