Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In Mark Webber’s conceptual world, on display at Anita Rogers Gallery, trees gently but surely infiltrate the architecture humans have contrived in their space. They embrace it, disorient it, crack wise about it, and generally take manmade structures down a peg, reminding them – us – that they were here first and have survived the longest. Here there are at least remote echoes of Malcolm Peacock’s massive sculpture of a redwood at the Whitney Biennial and louder ones of Giuseppe Penone’s Arte Povera tree-based sculptures unifying art and nature. Confronting the familiar argument that humans are malevolently stalking nature, though, Webber suggests that nature never takes it lying down. The stance is logical and paganistic, a bit more playfully so than the 7, 000 oaks that Joseph Beuys planted and connected to the Druids In the title of the show – “Keep Moving Forward While Waiting” – Webber appears to contemplate nature’s reciprocal advance if not its predation, and the message is still one of concern and caution – extendable, if you’re so inclined, to alarm.
Plaster Painting (Hydrocal, glass, paint, and string)
Variable; Each piece approximately 9 x 22 inches
Webber uses home building materials to make simple but expressively colored sculptures – miniatures of inhabitable buildings, or facades or remnants thereof, sometimes arranged in linear dioramas – into which he often introduces demurely small branches likewise scalable to large and potentially ominous ones. In an especially resonant and witty series, two slender structures subdued by branches brace a more substantial anthropomorphic complex that seems comically priapic. Then again, another piece has a branch seemingly bent in supplication before a rigidly vertical slab; or maybe it’s providing support. The pieces are untitled, which affords the exhibition recursive, therefore timeless, authority: this has happened, is happening, and will keep happening, unbound to particular places and times. As Webber himself rather ingenuously puts it, making the case for the trees, “their seemingly delicate forms, capable of impossible twists and turns, reveal a potent strength, a testament to nature’s innate capacity to devise its own plans.”
The tone and affect of the exhibition are neither didactic nor threatening. Webber is content to present the dynamic relationship between nature and people as a more or less benign, even winsome, phenomenon. At the same time, he must know his audience and his environment. The net effect is a sly, smart equipoise between observation and exhortation that might leave you not merely charmed by whimsy but also usefully agitated.
“Mark Webber: Keep Moving Forward While Waiting,” Anita Rogers Gallery, 494 Greenwich Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY. Through May 30, 2026.
About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
