Galleries: 'Facts and Fables' mixes sculpture with an outdoor stroll

Take a hat, lather on the sunscreen, and lose the flip-flops - this year, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education has decided to make you hike to its annual summer outdoor sculpture exhibition. It's an unchallenging ramble along the center's Widener Trail, as it turns out, through lovely, sun-dappled woods, open meadows, and an unexpected pine grove, with birds and other wildlife your only company.

Even better, the show, "Facts and Fables: Stories of the Natural World," is the first one I've seen here (or at the center's Second Site, a former farm located a mile or so away) to introduce visitors to a trail as the many trails here are intended to be used, thereby revealing more of the benefits of this accessible nature preserve within the city limits. The art gains from the trail logistics, too: Each sculpture you encounter gets your undivided attention.

Stop at the center's main building first and pick up the show's brochure, which contains a map identifying the locations of various sculptures. Some of the show's seven artists have small works in the gallery, among them Jeremy Beaudry, who invites you to take a copy of his small book, Nature Study: An Ambivalent Guide. Take him up on his offer - his book helps clarify his contributions to the exhibit outdoors.

All the works in "Facts and Fables" explore true or fictional stories involving nature, and they accomplish this in surprisingly different ways. They are also exceptionally modest works, even when they are large, possibly because they are not about art. When they do express a particular artist's style, it's in the service of illuminating or reexamining someone else's idea or story.

Taking the trail format literally and imaginatively, Beaudry has placed signs at intervals, bearing fragments of his conversations about nature with fellow artists and the center's director, and excerpts from books by the naturalist John Muir and others.

You can read these in their entirety in Beaudry's book, but the experience of coming upon them in nature, isolated from their book context, is magical.

David Dempewolf's Kitchen (Carelessness and Inattention Can Afford Us Any Remedy), a video in the gallery and a hand-stenciled panel outside, consists of images from memories and reveries relating to a text he read about the meeting between the poet Paul Celan and the philosopher Martin Heidegger. It's a fascinating piece, but the complex images in the panel would be easier to unravel in a pristine gallery space.