'Kerfuffle' is a beautiful way of looking at the mess we're in

It's not often that art curators have to water their exhibits — but one piece in Bumbershoot's "Kerfuffle: The Uneasy Relationship Between Humanity and Environment" requires occasional light mistings to make it flourish.

Vaughn Bell's "Biosphere Built for Two" is, literally, a living work of art: a suspended terrarium with two holes at the bottom of it where you can poke your head up and gaze at the plant life around you. It's interactive art at its best: surprising, beguiling, a real conversation piece.

And "Kerfuffle" is the standout in this year's lineup of art exhibits at Bumbershoot, which includes a Moscow-Seattle poster show, a Gage Academy "drawing jam" and a group exercise in random arts munificence called "Dada Economics."

The curators of "Kerfuffle" introduce their exhibit as "an uncompromising look at the environmental mess we have created in our world." What they don't say is how beautiful some of the results are.

Photographers Chris Jordan and Christina Seely are particularly alert to the tension between sublime visual effect and troubling environmental news. Seely's series, "Lux," features long-exposure shots of the planet's most light-polluted cities. Each photo fuses nighttime and daytime illumination into a single disorienting image, attuned to both "the immense beauty produced by man-made light" and that light's evidence of "complex negative human impacts on the health and future of the planet."

Jordan's interest is in numbers — and waste. His "Cell Phones #2, Atlanta 2005" is a single shot of umpteen discarded cellphones. It's an astonishing sight — but not as astonishing as "Plastic Bags, 2007" and "Plastic Bottles, 2007." Both look likevibrant abstracts from a distance. They're actually photo collages compiled from thousands of small photos, depicting, respectively, 60,000 plastic bags (the number used in the U.S. every 5 seconds) and 2 million plastic bottles (the number used every 5 minutes).

On the video front, Brent Watanabe's "Stack:Heap:Loop" is a daffy delight. What seems at first to be a video loop is actually an infinitely varied self-programmed work of computer animation, drawing on video-game logistics as a mother duck and her ducklings waddle through surreal, detritus-ridden landscapes. The computer generates its own "Pacman"-like blips, squeaks and alarms while it's at it.

There's plenty more, including an eerily scored found-film installation by Paul D. Miller (better known as DJ Spooky) and a sculpture/assemblage by Kuros Zahedi, composed from trash collected over theperiod of a year by Ari Derfel, co-founder and CEO of Back to Earth, Inc.

This isn't agitprop — this is fun, with a conscience.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com