The world is too much

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers… (William Wordsworth, 1807) In the early years of the Industrial Revolution, Wordsworth’s 1802 sonnet laments humanity’s sudden turn toward novel technologies and meaningless commerce, a shift of human attention away from the unknowable systems and fierce beauty of the natural world. As a contemporary response, The world is too much with us at Lisa Sette Gallery features new works by Binh Danh, Ala Ebtekar, Timothy Horn, Alan Bur Johnson, Mayme Kratz, David Kroll, Carrie Marill, Marie Navarre, Beverly Penn, and others; whose works examine the parallel changes taking place in our own era. Lisa Sette Gallery’s timely and stunning collection of contemporary nature-inspired works recalls Wordsworth’s message that it is to our benefit to remain intimately connected to the primordial forces that shaped us, the “Sea that bares her bosom to the moon/The winds that will be howling at all hours.” Centuries removed, the sonnet’s message remains urgent and clarifying, and the artists of The world is too much With Us express it through a variety of conceptual and material modes.