By Amanda Estes
Staff Writer    
Andy Rosen’s fantastical mixed media sculptures – displayed among Scott Listfield’s oil painting depicting a dinosaur and lion simultaneously roaming the streets in front of a graffiti covered Guggenheim Museum and Joshua R. Marks’ installation piece consisting of a tiny suburban landscape encased in glass domes – offer fodder for imaginative minds capable of creating the absurd or the unusual from commonplace objects.
The South Portland resident’s sculptures are currently on display in Whitney Art Works’ exhibition, “After the End of the World,” a multi-artist show offering aspects of both the strange and the familiar. The exhibit will run until Nov. 3 with an artist reception from 5 to 8 p.m. on Oct. 5.
Curator Jeff Badger said each artist offers a perspective of “a time or place that exists after the end of what we perceive as our world – broach[ing] this subject through different media, imagery and with a distinct emotional perspective, varying from epic to clinical to humorous.”  
In his latest work, Rosen mashes bits of the familiar together to form “rural constructions.”
“I’m really interested in using whatever’s lying around,” Rosen said during a recent interview at Whitney Art Works’ Congress Street gallery. Rosen’s latest work incorporates materials such as driftwood, concrete, foam, paper mache, hot glue and even part of an old screen porch.
Pointing to a sculpture entitled, “everything’s slowing down,” which is suspended from the gallery’s ceiling, Rosen offered insight into his creative process. The sculpture depicts an owl, made from bits of concrete, carrying the burden of a mountain on its outstretched wings. Rosen said he made the owl first and it had been hanging around in his studio for some time when he began constructing the mountain. Without any prior intent to put the two elements together, Rosen said he “just kind of smashed them together.”
The results are physical representations of Rosen’s musings on struggle and what it means to live in the world. His work embodies an aspect of folklore that he believes most people can relate to in some way. In his stories, animals stand in for humans. “You’re breaking up,” depicts a ship balancing vicariously on a curling wave. Underneath the wave, a beaver appears to be bracing himself against the impending crash.  
Rosen’s interests have changed since his art school days when he was focused on glass blowing and painting. He received a bachelor of fine arts from Alfred University in New York and a master of fine arts degree in painting and drawing from The University of Iowa.
“Glassblowing is a really expensive operation,” he said. “It certainly changed what people made [and] how often you got to do it.”
Rosen found inspiration in rural art forms such as taxidermy and whittling.
“I certainly respond to where I am,” he said. “I think it’s pretty strange that we stuff animals [and] why is whittling so popular?”
His  “vegan” stuffed animals, constructed from various materials, represent creation as a way of understanding. As an adjunct art instructor at the University of New England in Biddeford, he encourages his students to do the same.
“I think it’s important to even attempt to understand something by trying to recreate it,” he said.
Rosen said he showed the class a video about some of mankind’s first artists who used cave walls as canvases on which to capture their hallucinations. He said the paintings often depicted large beasts such as wooly mammoths, possibly as a way of paying homage.  
While Rosen said taxidermy might also be a way of paying homage to the animals, he sees in his work references to Native American totems in which animals serve as spirit guides.
The sculpture, “I can only take you so far,” depicts either a struggle or cooperation (Rosen prefers to leave it open ended) between a wolf and the broken ship he carries on his back. While the wolf seems to be struggling to go any further with the weight of the ship on his back, Rosen suggests maybe it is the boat that can only carry the wolf so far.   
Although the characters may look different today, Rosen said he has always been interested in how the struggle plays out. As a child, Rosen recalled “posing action figures out in the landscape,” where the tiny figures faced various dramas of his making.
“I think it’s kind of hard to quantify what this is,” Rosen said, surveying the exhibit. “A lot of these things exist in my imagination.”
Despite the exhibit’s title, Badger said the show isn’t about artists with apocalyptic visions.
“None of this work ostensibly is about the end of the world, but when you put them all together, that’s a thread that ties them all together,” Badger said.
He said, as a curator, he projects his own ideas on the works, but said each artist offers a perspective of what the end of the human world might look like.
“It’s the end of our world – nature will continue on whether we’re here or not,” Badger said.
Translated from the original Greek, Badger said the word apocalypse means, “the lifting of the veil.” In a biblical sense, Rosen said the apocalypse is a “contemporary horror story,” but the larger fear today seems to be that humans will be responsible for ruining their own world.
“I really like the notion of – something we’ve done kind of growing over,” Rosen said, adding that nature’s resurgence after humans are gone isn’t a pessimistic view of the world’s end.
For more information about, “After the End of the World” or Whitney Art Works, visit www.whitneyartworks.com. Gallery hours are 12 to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, or by appointment. The exhibit is located at 492 Congress Street in Portland.