New art gallery Churner and Churner opens with “No Man’s Land” by Joianne Bittle. The show is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.

“No Man’s Land” brings together two series of Bittle’s work: a recently completed group of paintings of jackrabbits (2008-2011) and the first of a series of portable dioramas.

Shown together for the first time, the paintings in Bittle’s series depict solitary, gnarled jackrabbits in a desert landscape. The hares’ agitated expressions disconcert the viewer in a reciprocal gaze, denying any attempt at anthropomorphization.

Nestled in a cargo trailer and parked on 10th Ave, Bittle’s diorama Preserving Mass Extinction is an imagined landscape of Marfa, Texas as it may have looked 250 million years ago, featuring fluorescent sponges, red tube coral, sea urchins and trilobites. A quotation of the American Museum of Natural History’s 1960s diorama of the Permian Sea, as well as a memorial to her own time in the West Texas desert, the installation connects ancient geological time to the present environment. It is the first in Bittle’s series Portable Landscapes.