Telephonebooth harvests Andy Messerschmidt’s huge, remarkable Agroccult

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In the center of a misty prairie stands a primate wrapped in a gilded shroud, a monolith, a talisman. A much smaller, unclothed primate climbs the larger beast — not a child reaching the shoulders of a parent but a lone animal attempting to transcend a hierarchy. This, an image titled “Magic Jack,” reminds us where our human story begins, recalls the first time that a thinking creature attempted to raise itself to higher ground, to a position of power. It also fairly sums up the aims of Andy Messerschmidt’s Agroccult series, some 600 paintings made over the past 14 years. Like “Magic Jack,” the rest of Agroccult explores the archetypes and mythologies that pervade humankind’s occupation of, and relationship with, Earth.

Messerschmidt’s images at Telephonebooth are laid out in a grid, which gives you the strong feeling that you’re navigating thumbnails on the artist’s website. It’s an effect best dealt with on your own, having given yourself plenty of time in the gallery. The reward for your immersion is that you find a bit of everything in the series: animals with painted faces, people in celebration, human-made structures that testify to our superior intelligence — each captured in 10-inch-by-10-inch squares. As elements of mythology begin to reveal themselves in these works, themes emerge, and then themes within themes, notions stacked atop one another like faces in a totem pole.

A favorite shape of Messerschmidt’s is the central spire — a figure or a building or a primate — rising like a mountain in the middle of a painting to summon the primal memory of something central. Every 10 paintings or so, we see a shift in Messerschmidt’s way of communicating this idea, a hop from animal totems and human rituals — each piece layered with history — to sparse fields of color that contain no recognizable players in our lore. In some of these transitions, his thesis obscures itself, the sheer volume of his industry threatening to swamp his intent.

With so many opportunities for the images to express a guilt whose origins are linked to crimes against fellowship, the work remains unsentimental. The destruction of traditions and beliefs seems like a big target when dealing with our relationship to the land and its occupants, but the work celebrates more often than it laments. Messerschmidt finds something transcendent in the passing of rituals and practices — the physical removal of fur to provide warmth for some other being, men passing around a bottle of booze, Santa tying a scarf onto a penguin. Throughout our culture and its roots, he sees beliefs and habits interwoven to form a comprehensive mythology.

His powerful depictions of man and animal cloaked in old traditions are most harmonious among smudges of the artist’s own fingers. When we see Messerschmidt’s literal hand in the work, we see our own impact on Earth the same way: Hardly anything goes untouched. Every human society lays its mark on the land like a fingerprint; our rituals, from religion to retail, burn, build, sprout and decay. Our animals thrive and then disappear forever. Our worship of the land yields destruction, yet we are in love with the idea that we are rebuilding. Somewhere, a fire burns at night, an animal is killed, and tradition wakes again the next day in empty churches or in worn furs. The Agroccult paintings with the most consciousness of this push and pull, this fetishization of the Earth, are the series’ most arresting.

Our celebration of progress and technology, of buildings and objects, is a worship whose roots we can’t easily trace and that has eclipsed more organic-seeming traditions. Maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe our traditions continue even without our individual participation because we are bound to rules we are equally bound to try to break. We are responsible but we are conflicted. We are, in many ways, trying to reconcile and ask the land for forgiveness. So reminds Messerschmidt’s sometimes overwhelming Agroccult.