We are just past the end of cherry blossom season in Japan. People have long flocked to see the spectacle and wonder at its natural beauty. The phenomenon enabled a Japanese scientist to assemble one of the longest-running datasets on climate change, drawing from 1,200 years of records on the trees’ annual bloom. The scientific inquiry and the aesthetic one exist in symbiosis.

They make the ugly truths of environmental destruction super pretty.

The same spirit motivates the works in “Human Impact: Contemporary Art and Our Environment,” on view through June 20 at BCA Center in Burlington. Each of the eight artists in the show creates a commentary on the ecological tipping point where we find ourselves, drawing viewers to the subject through enticing visuals. In other words: They make the ugly truths of environmental destruction super pretty.

Before even entering the gallery, visitors encounter the work of Rebecca McGee Tuck, an artist from Natick, Mass. Her steel sculpture, on Church Street, seems to bloom with single-use plastic bags like a weird desert cactus. Inside, viewers find Tuck’s wall relief “We Are the Lighthouse Keepers,” a woven composition made from bits of marine rope, oyster nets and lobster traps in vibrant shades of ultramarine blue, orange and translucent turquoise. We are appropriately lured in by its dense and varied textures, from chunky knitted surfaces to a foamy mass of fishing line. With this and other works in the show, Tuck deftly creates sculptures out of trash that don’t look like trash yet acknowledge the material as ubiquitous, as omnipresent as driftwood in the coastal landscape.

Philadelphia painter Diane Burko’s pieces offer an expanded view of the Amazon rainforest. Made after her 2023 residency there, the works have all the urgency of a fire alarm. In a suite of five canvases that together span more than 5 by 13 feet, as well as two smaller works, Burko combines maps and painted silhouettes of the region with aerial photos of the tree canopy and burnt cross-sections of wood. She elaborates on those close and distant views with an inferno of red and gray, illuminating the scientific with a passionate painterly approach.

Vermonters may be familiar with the work of Renée Greenlee, who lives in Huntington and has previously mounted installations of large fabric banners at Fletcher Free Library and the Moran FRAME on the Burlington waterfront. Here she takes a quieter approach, counterbalancing Burko’s fiery expanse with an arrangement of watery cyanotypes on silk, presented in wooden embroidery hoops. The artist buried the blue material in the ground, leaving it to decompose: Now it has the flaky texture of dead leaves after the snow melts. Greenlee has repaired it in places using gold metallic thread. The tiny embroidery stitches read as roads or dotted lines on a map, throwing the scale of ultimately abstract imagery into uncertainty; we seem to be looking at a landscape from a vast, aerial distance as much as an intimate, tactile one.

Nicolei Buendia Gupit, who teaches art at the University of Vermont, presents “In the Age of Abundant Scarcity,” a mysterious installation of what look like colorful, glowing plastic water bottles, arranged on a table with strips of LED lights. Closer examination reveals both natural and nasty-looking objects — twigs, a deflated balloon, a rusty nail, a plastic bag — suspended in ooze. In fact, the sculptures are made of resin and hold litter Gupit gleaned from streams during a Fulbright fellowship in the Philippines. She went to learn how people there — including members of her own family who work in the fishing industry — are dealing with a dearth of potable water and increased flooding in the age of climate change.

Gupit’s sculpture offers viewers a physical foothold in the gallery that serves as a bridge to the rest of her research-based practice, introducing us to a topic without giving us all the answers. That’s also true of other works in the show, including an installation by Jersey City, N.J., artist Adriane Colburn and a video piece by Irish artist John Gerrard.

Colburn’s work features bands of painted wood bent and looping across the wall like a model train set; satellite imagery and snaking networks of cutouts reminiscent of roads; sparkly potash deposits on paper, cut out and hovering over the images; and videos, some of which show invisible emissions from oil refineries. Gerrard’s three screens display oil slicks floating on water, but they’re not documentary. Each is in the shape of a country (Palestine, Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar) and is an algorithmic representation of its annual per-capita oil use based on real-time online data; the more iridescent the slick, the more fuel that country consumes. Both artists’ installations draw in the viewer with a shiny representation that’s only the tip of a much larger investigative iceberg.

Two documentary photographers take the opposite tack with instantly compelling images that seek to tell a whole story. Sallie Dean Shatz, a UVM alum who lives in Utah, photographs the Great Salt Lake as it recedes. Aerial perspectives show a strange, beautiful geometry of glassy water and white minerals in evaporation pools. Companies extract minerals such as arsenic, which blow into communities as toxic dust. Each of Shatz’s images subtly pictures ways humans have intervened in this landscape.

Kari Greer’s images recall now-annual news coverage of western wildfires, as well they should: The Idaho photographer is a former wildland firefighter. She enhances the formidable drama of burning landscapes by giving the images a glossy finish, as though seen on our digital screens. But you can’t scroll past these photos. Our knowledge that the artist has been actively and directly solving the problem — literally putting out fires — recasts them as optimistic and human.

Though the environmental future seems pretty bleak, these works by artists who can channel beauty even as they research destruction are inspiring. So is the simple act of making things. During a panel discussion held in conjunction with the show, Greenlee talked about the idea of repair and the mental focus that making art facilitates in the face of debilitating ecological grief.

“It makes us feel like we can’t do anything,” she said. “But I think art allows us to see and feel hope, and it can lead to action.” ➆

“Human Impact: Contemporary Art and Our Environment,” through June 20 at BCA Center in Burlington. burlingtoncityarts.org

The original print version of this article was headlined “Beauty and Beholders | Enticing visuals and environmental research coexist as artists explore “Human Impact” at BCA Center in Burlington”

This article appears in April 29 • 2026.

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