Mark Dion: Journey to Nature’s Underworld: Palmer Museum of Art, Penn State, University Park, PA

Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld explores the shared allegiances and sustaining bond between two celebrated artists over three decades. Maintaining singular stylistic voices, Dion and Rockman have achieved international prominence for their own distinctive practices while evolving their creative and intellectual trajectories in tandem. Each artist has long probed our strained relationship with the environment and the vast ecological consequences of current ideologies about nature. Uniting sculptures and paintings by both artists along with works on paper and a major new collaboration, this exhibition is organized as a journey of discovery through various pressing subjects, including waning biodiversity, global warming, and marine toxicity. 

Although working in different media, Dion and Rockman engage similar approaches and strategies, informed by intensive research and fieldwork; the language of scientific methodology and models; and allegory, dark humor, and references to popular culture. Both artists also employ methods of display found in museums of art and natural history—institutions of alleged authority and objectivity—which they slyly subvert in their practice. Like natural history displays and wildlife illustrations, their works are grounded in science and close observation, but presented in a rhetorical, sometimes even theatrical, manner. 

The underworld referenced by the title of the exhibition encompasses many related ideas: the metaphor of a land of the dead; the realm below the Earth’s crust; archaeological excavations; and elements of crime and wickedness. Within the context of Dion’s and Rockman’s works, the underworld also incorporates unexamined ideologies and unconscious beliefs about nature, the invisible micro and macro dimensions of the natural world, and a deep denial of humanity’s harmful course. 

Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld was organized by the American Federation of Arts, with support provided by Victoria E. Triplett and Elizabeth Belfer. The exhibition was curated by Suzanne Ramljak, Chief Curator at the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park.  

Images: 

Installation view at Palmer Museum of Art, Penn State, University Park, PA, 2025. Photo by Steve Tressler.