Image of “Staplerscape,” courtesy of Greater Reston Arts Center.

Travis Childers’ work in (UN)NATURAL, one of three concurrent shows at the Greater Reston Arts Center (GRACE) on display through February 18, alters and repurposes domestic objects into new contexts that touch on themes of habitat. Childers’ narratives center on nature and the banality of office life – two oddly disparate subjects that become subtly intertwined in his work.

You may remember Childers as a finalist in the Washington Post’s mildly controversial series Real Art DC. Interestingly, much of the work-in-progress he discusses in Real Art DC is presented in his exhibition at GRACE.

The centerpiece of (UN)NATURAL is an installation featuring a six-by-five grid of Brickscapes: bricks covered in miniature natural landscapes, from lushly forested plateaus to fractured Arctic ice sheets and sandy desert dunes. All along, the bricks remain prominently visible, the juxtaposition serving as a reminder of man’s struggle against nature. Are we seeing nature’s encroachment over the man-made? Or is the artist suggesting a commodified, manufactured natural world? The works, which share a thematic and technical affinity with Dutch artist Levi van Veluw‘s masterful self-portraits, subtly propose a tension between these two ideas.