For centuries, artists regarded nature as a source of beauty and harmony, an endless equilibrium of form and color, life and death. They kept returning to nature in quest of solace; it was the symbol of paradise. Today, nature offers little solace, however, and much less than paradise is revealed by Alexis Rockman, Bob Braine, and Mark Dion here. They present a world that has seldom appeared in art; their paintings, photographs, and installations tell of a destroyed nature, with which we are quite familiar, but whose existence we keep trying to block from our minds.

Rockman’s paintings show a