Daily Times

Moody Gallery has become a temporary art-and-natural history museum with Melissa W. Miller’s “Predators and Prey.”

Although one of her signature large, dramatic canvases anchors the show, along with smaller paintings of undersea scenes, Miller also has been trying her hand at sculpture. Realistic depictions of birds and other animals in clay sit on pedestals and shelves like specimens, within a laser-cut steel landscape that stretches across two walls.

“Moth” is one of two long, vertical collages whose elements are painted in more delicate-looking gouache. I presume the title refers to the huge atlas moth just above the center. This is one of the largest and most glamorous insects in the world, native to Asia, with a wingspan that can reach a foot across. Because the atlas moth has no mouth, it doesn’t eat once it emerges from its cocoon, dependent on stored energy that gives out within a week or two.

Staying alive for decades as an artist may feel something like that. A Houston native who has long lived in Austin, Miller retired from teaching at the University of Texas in 2011 but hasn’t mounted a show in her hometown for about 12 years.

‘Moth’ is one of two long, vertical collages whose elements are painted in more delicate-looking gouache. I presume the title refers to the huge atlas moth just above the center. This is one of the largest and most glamorous insects in the world, native to Asia, with a wingspan that can reach a foot across

She never intended to become an animal painter, but curators and collectors loved her approach. Her work seemed to be everywhere in the 1980s and 90s, including the 41st Venice Biennale and a Whitney Biennial or two.

Climate change and the anthropocene weren’t discussed by many people then. As Miller writes in a statement, animals became a handy allegorical vehicle for conveying stories about human dilemmas, cultural and personal anxieties, aspects of change and transition, and her awe and respect for nature. The abundance of creatures in historical art of the East and West also lent itself to stylistic and painterly experiments with romanticism, anthropomorphism and naturalism.

Miller’s recent works don’t need an imagined narrative. The circumstances of nature are the story now. “As populations expand, as emissions pollute the air and detritus saturates land and sea, our human role as predator takes on new meaning,” Miller writes. “Billions of tons of plastic in the ocean, melting glaciers and vanishing species generate an urgency and angst that I seek to understand and address.”

Now she sees her work as reportage. The plight of the natural world is an “observable reality,” she writes.

The star of “Moth” hangs between a flutter of smaller moths, which in general are sadly underappreciated insects, and earthbound mammals. A leopard stalks gazelles from a barren tree, deer leap to forage, a monkey eats grass. The outline of a safari jeep is barely there, almost hidden behind the big tree, suggesting that the animals are being watched and maybe hunted by humans.

Deer and birds flee the inferno of the big painting, “Forest Fire,” which could have been borrowed from a news image of last year’s cataclysmic blazes in California. In Miller’s smaller, vividly color-saturated paintings, one might see anger in the strong brush strokes as well as the compositions of anemones and fishes living in an environment littered with human detritus.

Several of the city’s dealers focus now on artists of Miller’s generation, but few of those who still with us have proven so adaptable. Perhaps in art, as in nature, there is something to that theory of survival of the fittest.

“Predators and Prey” is on view through Oct. 12 at Moody Gallery.