Understories by Meg Lagodzki at Harrison Center

Storm Damage #30, Meg Lagodzki

The Green, Green, Green of Home.

Continuing through March in the main Harrison Gallery of Harrison Center, is Meg Lagodzki's interesting two-fold exhibition depicting the marvelous orderly chaos and awesome intrinsic beauty of nature, Understories.

The show consists of an ambitious primary body of work, created from acrylic paint on collage paper, which seems a botanist's survey of a variety of trees, bushes and particularly wildflowers seen on a hike in a woods.  

Each picture, a jam-packed, organic macrocosm. Each a daunting, visual  jigsaw puzzle.  A quilting together of a myriad of woodland species, jostling amid the shade, overlapping each other for the sun. A cacophony of plants species dynamically enmeshed and intertwined. 

The second distinct group of works – an ancillary series of about 30 small oil paintings – neatly arranged along a wall of the gallery. In contrast to the collage works,  they appear more empty, more abstract. They are almost minimal in comparison to the wildly busy forest pieces.  

Each picture,  arranged in a symmetric long row, shows a young tree, presumably broken by strong straight-line winds.  Each slender trunk destroyed and fractured. Painted images that are at once awful and transfixing, and executed with a deft touch of jagged perfection.

Understories, as a  group, shows an artist's reverence for a forest at a human scale, to a nature undersky and at times underfoot, at ground level, where the wood meets the dirt.  

Seen up close, in the painted collages, you see the method of Lagodzki's magic. At a distance, you are lost in her exuberant forest. She achieves an exotic yet familiar arm's length landscape vision, as innocent as a childhood drawing, and as bountifully fertile as Mother Nature herself.   

Earth-tones, only, in Lagodzki's Gaia of mainly green. 

The piece Northwoods, Banshee, a large acrylic and collage, is a tour de force of a composition. A white willow's tendrils flow sideways across the picture, screaming in the wind. A close inspection of the painted paper show the care of Lagodzki's technique in imbuing all the different textures on the surface of her many papers with the paint. She achieves an overall richness through these various marks. Her hatching, spotting and slight variations in the layers of her color tones, create a tactile sensation on the eyes of the viewer.

Northwoods, September by Meg Lagodzki

Northwoods, September, in the same series and at the same scale, is more colorful, with blue sky peeking at the top, and gold and copper ferns and fronds at the foreground. 

The gray and skeletal dead limbs of a tangled pine forest inhabit the picture's center with a porcupine army of quills, working their way up the trunks.   

Bluebells, Meg Lagodzki

Some smaller collage works serve as a homage to individual flora species such as in Jewelweed, Gladeferns #2,  Bluebells and Pokeweed, and are touchingly observant in their execution. 

Fallen Trees, Collateral Damage.

The linear presentation of the smallish oil on canvas works, Storm Damage (# 1 through 30), (top and bottom of page) creates an impression of somber edification, not unlike the military section of cemeteries and their solemn marked rows of the fallen. 

Young trees, mainly, snapped much too soon, are the remembered heroes of Logodzki's tribute. 

We see what they shared, these victimized trees. The splintering trauma of an almighty power.  And we see them portrayed as the individual miracle machines of growth that they were, that all trees are, and all seeds have the potential to become, if only for a little while.

Storm Damage (various #'s 1 - 30) , detail of installation, Meg Lagodzki

Mark Diekhoff, March 2026 

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