A painting and collage exhibit by two west Michigan artists will be displayed in the Southwestern Michigan College Art Gallery until Nov. 26.

Works by Shanna Shearer and Mikey Henderberg hang in room 108 of the Dale A. Lyons Building on the Dowagiac campus.

Gallery hours are Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The gallery is open to visitors at no cost.

Her provocative paintings portray composite environments caught between divisive technological developments and meditative natural settings, foreshadowing new, perplexing anxieties such as rising flood waters and animals perishing.

In tandem with large paintings based on the natural environment, she creates smaller, more confrontational portraits.

“Portraits are a personal way of representing bigger ideas. For me, painting a portrait is a window into our psyche,” Shearer said.

Campus director at Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, she paints in a studio at her Pullman farm in Allegan County. She received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts with an emphasis in painting from Grand Valley State University in December 2004.

“The more time I’ve spent living on my farm and working at Ox-Bow, the more I’ve thought about our relationship to nature,” she said. “Before a time of industry and automation, humans spent a great deal of time making, building and collecting things we needed to survive. Our interactions with nature were out of necessity to create and to maintain one’s own homestead, but these connections to nature are different now. Instead, we go to the supermarket and home improvement store for the things we need, spending very little time at the actual source or origin of those necessities, such as farms or the woods. We now spend our time battling with nature, trying to tame, beat or control it through pesticides, levees, bulldozers, chainsaws and evacuation plans. These missed connections with our environment propelled these paintings.”

They include a man, a woman and a snake in dense jungle inside a geodesic dome which some interpret as an allegory for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Mikey and another man standing in water indoors after Hurricane Katrina, a house crushing an overturned vehicle outside the window; an “oblivious” couple who don’t seem to see a waterlogged deer collapsed on the shore or a fawn frozen in the background; and a self-portrait of her reclining like a mermaid, a bird perched on her palm that symbolizes nesting as a storm rumbles in, inspired by uncertainty surrounding her grandmother Florence’s death.

At their reception Nov. 12, Shearer explained the significance of water in summery paintings she creates while hibernating in winter.

“What if a geodesic dome is the only way we’re able to experience nature again because it’s fabricated and held safe for us because outside the dome is the real world we’ve stripped naked?” Shearer asked. “Those people seem dejected.”