Photo By Weston Art Gallery

Shawna Guip's "Extinction of a Species," on view at the Weston Art Gallery, speculates what Cincinnati would look like if nature eliminated the people

It's Nature. But it's not. This is the feeling you get when visiting the Weston Art Gallery's new summer exhibitions, found at the corner of Seventh and Walnut streets in downtown Cincinnati. The show brings together three artists who each study nature, then see how it can be distorted.

When you first walk in the gallery's street-level space, you can feel someone or something watching you. You look around, but there are only one or two people here, and they're reading something on the wall. "Where's the art?" you think. Then you look up, and are confronted with 15 swinging motorized birds.

"I was really taken by this space when I first came to visit," says artist Sophia Hayes. "It's so open and very vertical. The indoor space connects very strongly with the outdoors, and my art relates to that."

For this show, Flock, Hayes worked with John Gdula of Whitman Taxidermy to create 15 lifelike stuffed mallards. She then installed motors in the Weston's ceiling and attached a metallic T-bar. Wires hanging from the T-bar are attached firmly to the ducks, and they circle in unison, never touching each other and never deviating from their path.

"As I was installing this show, people on the street would stop to look in and watch these mechanical ducks. This is something that catches people's attention," Hayes says. "I want people to come in and be affected by this show, to question why I've done these works."

Hayes specializes in site-specific installations that strive to take an organic form that's no longer living and to re-create some kind of life. At the same time, in each of her shows, Hayes deliberately tries to make the installation look artificial. This time, it was the visible wires hanging from the birds to the T-bars.

Since 1997 Hayes has "re-launched" various animals: a quail bound to a bunch of balloons was set loose on the Isle of Portland, off the coast of England, and videotaped until it disappeared over the horizon (Launch, 2002); a shoal of fish encased in resin was suspended in a lake jetty (Dislocate, 2001); and humans performed surgical operations on the bodies of broken insects (Reparation, 1999).

For this particular show, Hayes submitted a proposal two years ago. She hails from England, but Cincinnati colleagues Timothy Riordan and Diana Duncan Homes gave a catalogue of her work to Dennis Harrington, who directs the Weston Gallery. Hayes met the two artists during a residency in Prague. She traveled to Cincinnati in October 2004 to study the space. Her installation took about nine days to set up.

After you leave the watchful eyes of the birds, you can walk downstairs to the Weston's lower level and see Shawna Guip's Artificial by Nature, where you'll immediately run into rain meandering down the large glass windows. But it's not water.

"She used mineral oil instead of water, because the oil drips slower," says Emmy Hartmann, age 10, a "docentito" who helps with tours (she's a participant in the Weston's summer camp for kids). "This one's my favorite. It looks like real rain coming down windows."

Guip's true-to-life mixed-media installation shows the intricate and symbiotic relationship between people and the world around them. One of her pieces is a close-up portrait (oil on linen) of an opossum that she found in her trashcan one night. Another shows a disjointed group of pigeons. Guip says these are examples of animals that feed off humans, but that humans view as pests.

"I wanted to show that we're not as separate from nature as we think we are," she points out. "I draw from places and experiences I've had in the area -- I try to look for those symbiotic relationships between things."

A Cincinnati native and 1998 UC graduate, Guip draws from her sights and experiences in the area. One piece, "Extinction of a Species," shows what the Cincinnati area would look like if nature eliminated people and just left the roads and bridges standing.

Another stand-out piece is "Self-Sounding Drum," a display of Mexican jumping beans. To accompany the work, Guip painted a timeline of the beans' life: First, the beans fall from the tree. Moth larvae enters the beans, where they live until it's time to break out of the shell and fly away. That's why the beans jump when they get hot.

"I like to switch gears and work in different mediums. It's a different frame of mind, and one satisfies the other."

Pass through Guip's section, and you'll run into Iteration, a show by Cincinnatian Celene Hawkins. Her work includes digitally altered pictures of objects in nature. In one piece, "Tenebrae I," she combines sharp, electric green tree branches and pictures of a thick, shadowy cell. These works look like Photoshop on ecstasy -- some are brightly colored, and some are black-and-white, but all are enticing.

A key piece of Hawkins' show is a group of sculptures set up in a narrow room off the main gallery. There you walk among tree branches and white Christmas lights that highlight a surreal trip. The stuff that crunches beneath your feet is excelsior, a wood fiber.

"I saw this stuff on my neighbor's lawn and had to ask her where she got it," Hawkins says. "Other people know it as a seed germination blanket."

Hawkins graduated from UC in 1994 and has more recently undertaken installation work. She started getting into photography because it was a good way to outline her larger installation pieces. For this show she uses metal, ceramic, plaster and encaustic materials to study commonalties in nature.

"I wanted to show a more romantic version of landscapes than previously shown in traditional paintings. These are very humble pieces of nature that are shown in a very beautiful, romantic way."