Photo By Laura Leffler

Get out the repellent: Nathan Tersteeg's bee-infested paintings at Publico

I don't know a lot about "Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends," (apparently a cartoon from the early 1980s) but I do know a little something about malls. It took a visit to Publico (1308 Clay St., Over-the-Rhine), and a look at Nathan Tersteeg's six gouache paintings for me to understand the connection, which is actually far more mature than Orange Julius and Spiderman would have me believe.

For the exhibition I am SWARM, Nathan Tersteeg, a 30-year-old artist who grew up in a town called Factoryville, Pa., recalls an episode of the aforementioned cartoon in which "a meteor crashes to Earth mutating the inhabitants of a nearby beehive (resulting in) Swarm. A living creature composed entirely of the bodies of thousands of bees, he is bent on turning Earth's entire population into humanoid bees."

Drones. Working without thinking. Existing without deliberation. Buzzing along next to their neighbor. And, of course: malls. In the paintings at Publico, Tersteeg documents six windowless blocks of concrete and consumerism -- perfectly rendered maps of actual malls where he has spent time "shopping a bit: a watch for my girlfriend, a new pair of pants, perhaps a Bavarian pretzel, catching a cone of Dippin Dots..."

Tersteeg paints his mall maps in awkward, unlikable pepto-pinks, mustard-yellows and lime-greens that somehow remind me of every shoulder-bumping shopping experience I've ever had. The maps are architectural, flat and blocked-in, and tell you nothing about where you are. Looking into these planes of color, you get the feeling you will wander through these stores and hoards forever. And anyone who has been caught in an unfamiliar mall, desperately searching for the exit sign, can conjure this sensation without even trying.

The colors add up to more than they are, though, and the little blocks in each mall work together to create something visually interesting. How Tersteeg manages that is simple, but more than a little ingenious: He paints the Swarm.

Little black bird-like specks and checks fall from the buildings, dropping, floating, soaring in groups or alone, converging or falling apart, reminding me of nothing more than the images of people jumping from the World Trade Center in 2001. In that sense, they remind me of disaster. Yet the Swarm in Tersteeg's paintings follows no crashes or meteors or hijacked planes. The buildings are perfectly intact. It is what it is -- a mess of masses -- without, it seems, an instigating force.

In each of the paintings, the Swarm takes on a different form. Sometimes it lurks in the corners of the mall. Other times, the Swarm spreads out, covering the lower half of the painting. In the latter works, we can't tell if the little specks are coming or going. My estimation is that they are doing both. Though they look nothing like bees, they are acting like them -- leaving their hive to work, only to return and deposit their honey in the same place every time.

Tersteeg's point is suddenly so lucid (not to mention creepy). It's not that the disaster isn't happening; it already has. The meteor that mutated the bees has already slammed into Earth. But Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends did not do such a great job saving our planet, because here we are, humanoid bees, buzzing in and out of our requisite malls to spend and make and spend our money over and over again.

The thing that makes Tersteeg's exhibition better than the average artist's crack at consumerism is that he isn't really condemning it: he is owning up to it. The show's title, I am SWARM, implicates himself more than his audience -- which, now that I think of it, might be the very first time I have said that about an artist.

The criticism that Tersteeg implies is not personal. It's fundamental. He never really talks about the cult of materialism. He seems to genuinely like malls. But despite that, he understands what they do to society: cause blindness, emptiness, envy and isolation.

In Tersteeg's own words: "I became interested in the experiences I had wandering the dirt malls of near-defunct towns. Dead stores and bored teenagers wandered between one another, asking one another for attention and favors like dueling panhandlers."

Sad sacks slumped against our fortresses, all of us like the teenager struggling to be popular. Or at least, just for once, to be recognized. Grade: A-