Art Review: Artists Explore ‘Human Impact’ on the Environment at BCA Center

Enticing visuals and scientific research coexist in the Burlington exhibition of eight artists’ beautiful paintings, photographs and installations.

by Alice DodgeApril 29, 2026

“They make the ugly truths of environmental destruction super pretty”.

We are just past the end of cherry blossom season in Japan. People have long flocked to see the spectacle and wonder at its natural beauty. The phenomenon enabled a Japanese scientist to assemble one of the longest-running datasets on climate change, drawing from 1,200 years of records on the trees’ annual bloom. The scientific inquiry and the aesthetic one exist in symbiosis.

The same spirit motivates the works in “Human Impact: Contemporary Art and Our Environment,” on view through June 20 at BCA Center in Burlington. Each of the eight artists in the show creates a commentary on the ecological tipping point where we find ourselves, drawing viewers to the subject through enticing visuals. In other words: They make the ugly truths of environmental destruction super pretty.

Before even entering the gallery, visitors encounter the work of Rebecca McGee Tuck, an artist from Natick, Mass. Her steel sculpture, on Church Street, seems to bloom with single-use plastic bags like a weird desert cactus. Inside, viewers find Tuck’s wall relief “We Are the Lighthouse Keepers,” a woven composition made from bits of marine rope, oyster nets and lobster traps in vibrant shades of ultramarine blue, orange and translucent turquoise. We are appropriately lured in by its dense and varied textures, from chunky knitted surfaces to a foamy mass of fishing line. With this and other works in the show, Tuck deftly creates sculptures out of trash that don’t look like trash yet acknowledge the material as ubiquitous, as omnipresent as driftwood in the coastal landscape.