Upon first entering the exhibition William Wegman: Hello Nature, a viewer’s eye is drawn to the title wall, which features a large-scale reproduction of a family gathered around a campfire beside a lake. The addition of paint enhances the scene so that the feet of a boy appear to grow roots, and foliage stretches the treetops toward the ceiling. For those most familiar with Wegman’s photographs of his beloved Weimaraner dogs, the introductory image is a revelation. While best known as a video artist and photographer, Wegman is also a prolific painter and draftsman, and the title wall anticipates the works on view in the exhibition while presenting a clever extension of Wegman’s artistic practice that continues throughout most of the galleries.

William Wegman: Hello Nature features over one hundred paintings, drawings, photographs, and a film, all made between 1969 and 2012. Infused with the artist’s trademark balance of humor and sophistication, the works on view are largely inspired by his lifelong connection to Maine. The related publication Hello Nature: How to Draw, Paint, Cook, and Find Your Way complements the exhibition, but also stands on its own with amusing remembrances by Wegman and of Wegman by the American novelist Padgett Powell, as well as insightful essays by the curators, Kevin Salatino and Diana Tuite. Wegman’s approach to nature has been informed by the rich artistic and literary interpretations that have preceded him. Equally important to his vision, as the introductory panel states, are the vernacular materials “that have shaped our cultural expectations of the outdoors,” including the Boy Scout manuals, outdoor magazines, field guides, and postcards. The visually dynamic catalogue is comprised of full-bleed page spreads of artwork interspersed with details from these archival sources, which are skillfully echoed in its design.

Both the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue reveal Wegman’s relationship to nature and the profound effect it has had on his life and artistic practice. Indeed, his work is like a love letter to nature—the expression of a deep-rooted, profound, and fundamental affection built out of respect and appreciation. In an “About the Author” essay written by the artist, he makes clear that from his earliest days nature—and art making—were integral to his life. As a boy growing up in Massachusetts and Connecticut, he hiked, fished, and camped while studying Boy Scout manuals and devouring Hardy Boys mysteries. His love affair with Maine began in the summer of 1957 when he and several teenage friends spent time in the Rangeley Lakes region. Since 1978, Wegman has divided his time between this part of Maine and New York City.

In the 1960s Wegman studied painting at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and moved toward performance and installation work while in graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While Conceptual art has always been an important part of his practice, he returned to painting in the mid-1980s. While he works in both oil and acrylic, in re-learning how to paint he was particularly drawn to the watercolors he learned to use as a boy. Wegman is clearly well versed in the history of art, and painters like Paul Cézanne and Winslow Homer are referenced both directly and indirectly in works in the exhibition, but it is his embrace of archival material both as source material and as physical objects in his work that really resonates. Since the 1990s, a recurring strategy in Wegman’s bag of tricks has been to incorporate postcards, both real and fake, into his paintings.

In The Beach/The Sky (2006), for example, the upper half of the painting emanates from a single postcard but appears to include others which are painted to look like real postcards—they are delicate abstractions that emerge as paintings within paintings. In other works, postcards serve as picture windows: a house floats on and becomes one with the lake in Water Damage (2012); in Lake View (2006), a woman on water skis heads directly toward a living room. As with his dog pictures, disguise and illusion are central themes of his work. In her essay for the catalogue, Tuite describes them as “hybridized spaces,” attempting to merge fiction and reality by fusing postcards and painting or uniting dogs with the natural landscape. “Wegman allows the postcards to retain their status as both cultural artifacts and sites,” writes Tuite, “stitching them together and transitioning between their eclectic, often kitschy imagery. The result is a delirious topography into which the physical cards themselves dissolve” (134).

While works in all media are installed together throughout William Wegman: Hello Nature, the first focused engagement with the artist’s photographs occurs in the second gallery. A series of contact sheets consisting of grids of up to twelve images documents wood grain and knots, evergreen fronds arranged in patterns, and dead leaves displayed against brightly colored paper. These nature specimens were among the first images Wegman produced for the portfolio Field Guide to North America and to Other Regions, the highlight of this gallery. Displayed in a handsome case made of unfinished pine and plywood, the portfolio of drawings, photographs, paintings, specimens, and collages was published in 1993 in a special edition of twenty-two. In the catalogue Wegman describes it as “something that would combine the New England Transcendentalism of my inherited birthright with a lifelong interest in hiking, fishing, canoeing, and birch bark” (22). The range of inspirations includes fishing magazines, camping cookbooks, and nineteenth-century nature writing, while leaves and other natural materials are incorporated into the pages. In one photograph, Wegman brings art into nature by hanging paintings of trees and sunsets in the woods. In others the Weimaraners are present, but so are pictures of a bear and a pin-up girl attached to a sheet with writing discussing human abuse of the environment and the sexuality of trees. Wegman’s work explores the ways in which we socialize and domesticate the natural world, and in the Field Guide, our comfort level with nature is bolstered through the insertion of humor and familiar pop-culture references.

Although Wegman has been taking pictures of his Weimaraners since the late 1970s, they became major subjects of his work in the early 1990s, starring in children’s books, films, and videos in addition to the well-known photographs. Also in this gallery are Polaroids featuring his dog Fay Ray’s daughters Batty and Crooky as the Hardly Boys—“they’re girls and dogs . . . hardly boys” (22). In Wegman’s 1996 film The Hardly Boys in Hardly Gold, which is screened in a small room off the next gallery, Batty and Crooky go to their Aunt Gladiola’s house for lunch only to find her missing and themselves enmeshed in a mystery that affects the whole town. The film, which was shot in Maine, also celebrates summertime recreational activities like canoeing, hunting for butterflies, and tennis. It is hilarious to watch the dogs’ eyes and heads follow the balls that their human counterparts, whose vision is obstructed by costumes, attempt to volley back and forth. Wegman also incorporates archival material, including a promotional film of the Rangeley Lakes region, and even re-purposes his own work—the black-and-white Polaroids of Hardly Boys characters seen in the previous gallery appear in a scrapbook in the film.

In one small gallery with a full-scale detail of the red plaid fabric used to wrap Wegman’s field guide installed on the back wall, there are ten chromogenic prints of the dogs engaged in the artist’s typically amusing configurations—laying out on beach rocks in Washed Up and wearing a wig of seaweed in Algae Girl (both 2002). While there is cohesion in terms of subject and medium, this gallery is not as visually interesting after the dynamic intermixing of media throughout the rest of the show.

William Wegman: Hello Nature is handsomely and creatively installed, and the overarching theme of nature as the artist’s inspiration is constant throughout. The exhibition’s organization is driven by strong connections between works rather than by forced themes, media, or chronology. While there is a fair amount of work throughout the five galleries, the show does not feel overhung. The use of wallpaper with details from Wegman’s paintings, the introduction of painted scenes by the artist, as well as the inter-hanging of works of all media activate the space, creating a sense of environment and adding complexity—and fun—to the viewing experience. For example, in one gallery a series of works is hung against a wall painting of a dark blue abstraction of a river and lake described by the words “inlet” and “outlet.” There is one label to the side so that the flow of images is not disrupted, and they happily commune with the wall painting. The exhibition is not label heavy, and while not particularly consistent, when there is text beyond basic object information, it is well written and intelligent without relying on jargon or being overly didactic. There is additional commentary by Wegman available via cell phone, but it does not add hugely to our understanding of the work.

Following Funney/Strange, the comprehensive exhibition and catalogue of Wegman’s work at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 2006, William Wegman: Hello Nature successfully demonstrates the artist’s multi-faceted relationship to the outdoors and to Maine in particular. Despite the seemingly narrow range of this theme, the exhibition presents a fairly deep representation of Wegman’s work in drawing, painting, and photography. The incorporation of archival sources and natural materials is an additional layer that complicates the work while providing another means for the artist to express both his sense of humor and his ever-present curiosity about this thing called life.