Ah, the summer days. Hot, hot. Sweat on the back of your neck. You cool down at the shady watering hole, if you’re a deer. If you’re not a deer, and live, not in the woods, but in, shall we say, the steamy cement of NYC, then you may want to chill out with an ice-cold beer. Maybe at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Gallery, where Ann Craven’s June installation of paintings and beer embodies the quintessential summer experience. Sit back, sip slow, be wide eyed with the heat wave at “Deer and Beer.” To be languorous in the tall grass, to graze in Chelsea, is to honor these halcyon days of 2006, and the general state of the mammal.

With conceptual contributions by artist Josh Smith (and others) a theme of contemporaries and collaboration parallels an environmental discussion centered on accumulation and creativity. The comical connection, “Deer and Beer,” is juxtaposed against the alienation of nature, and its reconstitution as pictoral. As the debris in the gallery compiles, a further implication arises: that of where we indulge our tendency towards destruction. In the context of a gallery exhibition, we are forced to quantify our consumption, to suffer the effect of our languor. Class barriers are unpleasantly stripped away; the modicum of distinction between lower and higher (our culture and ourselves) loses coherence. The watching eyes of Craven’s Deer bear witness. If the trees are gone, if the animals are artificial, if we are pristine in our Chelsea galleries with cement floors, grey counters and white walls, we are lost in the forest, still.

Ann Craven is currently on exhibition in Brussels, Belgium at Galerie Catherine Bastide. She lives and works in New York City, where she is represented by Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.