The plants and animals of desert landscapes have long been a source of inspiration and contemplation for artists. A current exhibition from the Art Institute of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum features four artists portraying desert ecosystems using a contemporary lens. Through March 10, Desert Senses: Visions from the West features work from Dianne Bennett, Andrew Denman, Megan Johnson and Daniel Prendergast, with each artist exploring their own relationship with the landscape. 
Andrew Denman, Primary (Red-Breasted Sapsucker), acrylic on board, 23½ x 22½”
Bennett hopes that her work encourages people to think about how they can act as stewards for the natural world. “During quarantine, my daily encounters with jackrabbits, desert cottontails, birds, coyotes and other desert residents sustained me and inspired a purpose for my feelings of isolation,” she says.
She’s created a series of paintings that use reclaimed road signs as her painting surface, which she calls “Celestial Terrestrials and Holy Ghosts.” Using a reclaimed stop sign as her base, Bennett’s “Rowiki Take Me With You” features a Mojave black-tail jackrabbit and imagines the animal as having a special connection to the cosmos, “his ears as antenna to the galaxies,” she says. 
Daniel Prendergast, Through Me, A Curve, oil on canvas, 24 x 24”
Denman’s Icon is part of a series that positions animals as subjects of reverence, in this case imagining a vervet monkey as Mother Nature and her child as a savior of endangered wild landscapes. He says, “This series is never meant to parody anyone’s faith, but rather use immediately recognizable religious imagery to imbue to subject with the awe and wonder I feel when I am in nature.” 
Megan Johnson, What Will Be, gouache and watercolor on Yupo, 30 x 24”
After moving from Chicago to Arizona at age 10, Prendergast became mesmerized by the hard, sometimes spiky desert landscape. His painting Through Me, A Curve came into being after observing how the plants and his garden changed in the late afternoon shadows. He explains, “In this instance, the two giant rosemary mounds in the foreground, the giant cereus cactus’ arched arm in the middle ground and the desert marigold blossoms in the extreme foreground all delighted me with their curvy repetitions emphasized by shadowy punctuations.” 
Dianne Bennett, “Rowiki Take Me With You,” oil on salvaged metal road sign,36 x 36”
Johnson’s artistic process involves taking long trail runs and hikes, and during one hike in Tonto National Forest at the beginning of 2022, she came across the Saguaro Rehabilitation Project, which has a mission to rehabilitate a section of the forest that was ravaged by fire. Inspired by the mission, she began volunteering with the project and replanting desert plant species.
“In my piece What Will Be, I wanted to show both the future of what the desert will be because of the efforts being taken by the Saguaro Rehabilitation Project, and show the remaining impact from the fire,” she says. “Both ends the cycle, life and death, coexist in the desert landscape.” —
Desert Senses: Visions from the West
Through March 5, 2023
Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, 2021 N. Kinney Road, Tucson, AZ 85743
(520) 883-3024, www.desertmuseumarts.com
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