E-Mail This Article to a Friend Lighter than air Robert ParkeHarrison’s lofty earth mission BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

Charlie Chaplin meets the Sierra Club in the forlorn, whimsical, environmentally attuned photographs of Robert ParkeHarrison, whose two current shows — one at the DeCordova Museum and the other, in collaboration with his wife, Shana ParkeHarrison, at the Bernard Toale Gallery — pay tribute to an artist whose inventiveness and vision are bound up with a sense of political and spiritual mission. If ParkeHarrison weren’t an artist, he’d be a statesman or a priest.

A quixotic quest — made all the more sad and comical by the frequent inclusion of scrappy, make-believe, 19th-century-looking mechanical equipment — runs through much of ParkeHarrison’s imagery. In a typical photograph, a solitary man in a wrinkled suit and white dress shirt — the artist himself — is righting some wrong done to nature. Take Cloud Cleaner, from one of the most powerful of ParkeHarrison’s series, "Earth Elegies (1999–2000)." Against a backdrop that straddles the atmosphere of a dream and the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, the character in the foreground has dutifully arrived with his preposterous cleaning supplies: ladder, bucket, tree branch. He’s about to scrub the sooty, palpable cloud that hovers a few feet overhead.

Cloud Cleaner draws its strength in part from the multiple intersections at which it stands: pathetic and eager, ridiculous and purposeful, zealous and doomed, silly and serious. But there’s more than emotional complexity to ParkeHarrison’s work. One of his hallmarks is the ability to suggest the utter interiority of the mind (every picture could be a still from a nightmare) while offering a panoramic, desolate view that suggests the entirety of the earth. We’re at once inside and outside, in somebody’s head and outdoors. Both land and sky imply infinity in a ParkeHarrison photo; an uninterrupted horizon of tundra or desert or Ground Zero will extend in the background, transforming whatever the character is doing into the activities of the last man on the planet. And it’s in that evocation of the last man or the only man that these images resonate. They’re both private and public, reveries and actions. The places are real; they just don’t happen to exist.

The actions of ParkeHarrison’s character turn out to be the most salient feature of his works, more so than the technical wizardry required of their making or their compositional characteristics or their exquisite detail and tonal variation. In that sense, ParkeHarrison is like an old-fashioned storyteller. His images are sepia-toned film stills from earth’s moving picture, tragic comedies predicated on the nobility and the futility of one person’s efforts to rescue Mother Earth. Mending the Earth — the artist delights in imaginative fulfillments of literal titles — involves the application of a giant sewing needle (threaded with a string that could pull in a whale) to a tear in the earth’s surface. The land tailor looks as if he were stitching together two halves of a stretch of recently cooled lava. Gas appears to rise up from the fissure in the distance; not so much as a tumbleweed relieves the vista of its barrenness. What’s more, ParkeHarrison’s visible absorption as a character in Mending the Earth — his eyes concentrate on the rip in the ground; his hand delicately rests on the tear; his body crouches in a position that would allow him to penetrate the rocky land with his javelin-sized needle — makes him a recording artist of his own performances. Cindy Sherman’s seminal "Untitled Film Stills" explore the mutability of the self. Robert ParkeHarrison offers up an unchanging self in the service of combatting devastation to the globe.

But cleaning clouds, repairing land, distributing seeds (Pollination, The Sower), or creating an alternative earth (Kingdom) is only part of this character’s résumé. An effort to belong to and participate in the natural world forms another major theme in ParkeHarrison’s photographs, and those images frequently attain eloquence and foreboding. Night Garden sees the photographer performer (performographer?) tenderly cupping soil around a low-slung plant that happens to be an incandescent light. In Nocturne, the artist lies in a fetal position at the center of a crude nest on a forest floor. More often, though, the character aims to be air-bound or air-producing or aerated. In several, he’s simply trying to fly. Da Vinci’s Wings finds ParkeHarrison balanced on a dead tree while outfitted in a canvas-and-twig version of Leonardo’s sketches for flying with manufactured wings. In Flying Lesson, he goes farther. The man in the middle of the photograph flaps his arms; each of his wrists connects by string to nine sky-borne birds, and for a moment it might occur to you that the figure is just thin enough and the birds are just strong enough for him to levitate. (A caged bird is strapped to his left wrist — a parallel to his own earthboundness?)

Although Visitation also treats the theme of flight and the desire to participate in the natural world, it represents a significant departure for ParkeHarrison, since he’s not the performer. The dwarfed figure of our Chaplin-esque auteur brings a bouquet of flowers — desiccated, of course — to the remains of a crash victim. Said remains are a towering, papery wing, so one presumes the victim is Icarus. Not only is there a direct allusion to mythology here, but ParkeHarrison has allowed somebody else — albeit somebody who’s vestigial and dead— into his frame. For once, there’s a dialogue with another creature.

One of my favorite ParkeHarrison photos is Windwriting, an effort to internalize and channel and thereby "write" air. The photographer actor writes outdoors into a book almost as big as his body. His writing instrument is also gigantic, a crude pen that’s attached by strings to eight towering, unbelievable plants — they look like leftovers from a Edward D. Wood Jr. flick. The author sports a metallic cap topped by a simple weathervane.

Compared with, say, Skyscrapers, in which 10 ParkeHarrison clones move across a wasteland where pencil-thin branchless and leafless trees extend like wires up to Heaven, Windwriting seems less polemical, less didactic. The best of ParkeHarrison’s images forget their high-minded action-hero intentions and give way to the pure playfulness of their inception — in Forestbed, our hero’s sleeping body lies on a mattress that balances magically atop a bunch of twigs. The environmental activist is never absent from ParkeHarrison’s imagery, but to see both the DeCordova exhibit and his Bernard Toale Galley collaborations with Shana (whose involvement in her husband’s photography has grown to the point that she shares billing in the newest work at the Toale) is to wish that the artist placed greater trust in his own politics. Sometimes there’s a kind of political correctness, an a priori insistence on what a picture should "say" as opposed to what you find out in the process of making it.

No such process takes place in Turning to Spring, which is on view at both venues. The earth’s surface has been pulled back like a thin rug to reveal a network of interlocking metal cogs while the figure of ParkeHarrison maneuvers a huge wrench; he’s fixing the ground. Compare that with Earth Elegies at the DeCordova, in which the artist attempts to push a 10-foot-tall typewriter ball, the kind that used to spin at the center of IBM Selectrics, across a vast empty field. Or hold it up against Burn Season at the Toale, in which the sleeping figure of the artist drifts on a bed that’s floating on a placid sea. No one answer explains the meaning of either image. These latter two works are not one-liners but narratives — imaginative, mysterious, and continuously captivating.

"Robert ParkeHarrison: The Architect’s Brother"

At the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln, through January 2.

"Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison: New Works"

At Bernard Toale Gallery, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, through October 16.