The Nasher Museum of Art

It must be emphasized that it is impossible to pigeonhole the artists into any one group, since most of them have purposefully sought to resist easy classification and are intent on provoking us to think about nature and what art has to say about it on a number of levels.

Many of us, when we think about art and nature, find that painting immediately comes to mind. But because nature and the act of painting have been so closely associated for centuries and so often the subject of exhibitions, there has been a conscious choice instead to focus here on video, photography, new media and sculpture. Even so, painting is never absent, and much of the work in the exhibition looks back, at least allusively, to that long history.

Joseph Beuys anchors this section with a lithograph documenting a performance in which the forest is swept with brooms to protest its imminent destruction. Lothar Baumgarten and Stephen Vitiello address the rainforest and the plight of its residents, and Sergio Vega examines colonial fantasies about paradise. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle deals with the disconnect of scientists responsible for our nuclear age, and An My Lê tells the story of the Vietnam War based on popular culture. Collier Schorr and Renee Cox deal with war and insurgency, while Hope Sandrow questions the decisions of politicians in an upscale community. Rosemary Laing views Australia's natural landscape as a media construct and deplores the displacement of aboriginal culture. Zwelethu Mthethwa documents workers in South Africa's ecologically destructive sugar industry, and Simon Starling's project addresses the replacement of an indigenous forest in Trinidad with an artificial one.

The notion of "poetics" is used in a broadly inclusive way in the context of this exhibition with reference to a variety of cultural manifestations including legends, fairy tales, myths and religious narratives, as well as the more modern enterprise of cinema.

Jennifer Bolande has a grown-up take on imagining goblins in the wallpaper, and Petah Coyne's Virgin Mary is an apparition in an enchanted forest. Kiki Smith views Little Red Riding Hood's wolf as a champion of nature; Phyllis Galembo pokes fun at the same story, and Anna Gaskell's costumed girls also come from fairy tales. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's crime scene is influenced by film noir, and David Claerbout uses cinematic conventions to tell a shaggy dog story. Wim Wenders, a renowned filmmaker, urges us to remember the importance of place. His photograph is set in a bamboo forest, as is Yang Fudong's film, which is a contemporary take on an old Chinese legend.

The final section of the exhibition includes artists who propose real-life solutions to environmental problems or who employ scientific methodology in their work. It also includes documentation of art that is performance based, as well as the work of artists who were commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art to inaugurate its new home.

Alan Sonfist is best known for his Time Landscape, a replanting of an indigenous forest in Manhattan. Carsten Holler takes a scientific look at a romantic story and teaches love songs to birds. Rodney Graham's inspiration for his upside-down tree is a camera obscura, and Joseph Bartscherer resembles a 19th-century naturalist researching typologies. Paul Etienne Lincoln's loopy performance celebrates a lost tree, and Joan Jonas devises a makeshift theater in the woods. Pioneering cyber artist Wolfgang Staehle brings the local forest inside via the Internet, and Patrick Dougherty creates a special sculpture from saplings found in the adjacent woods.