Paintings and sculptures by Mark Messersmith go on display Sunday at the Butler Institute of American Art.

Messersmith is a Florida artist whose work explores themes of spirit and struggle within our modern world’s “natural environments.”

He is interested in a group of painters who came to Florida from the northeastern United States immediately following the Civil War, including Martin Johnson Heade, George Inness, Thomas Moran, James Audubon and Winslow Homer. They painted with a romantic vision of this exotic southern landscape. Even though they looked at this world as artists with some scientific curiosity and even concern, they still painted it through rose colored field glasses of dreamy romantics.

Messersmith’s work builds on stories and his observations and concerns for wild creatures that move within the shrinking natural Florida environs they still manage to inhabit. Creatures moving between and over one another, trying to survive the persistent pressure and chaos of our human self-concerned lives within a darkening illumination of their own fading wilderness.

According to the artist, “My work is really about our relationship to all other living creatures at this precarious moment, a place midway between hope and despair.”

The show includes 14 painting and four sculptures. His work has been featured in solo and group shows and is included in numerous museum collections.

“Allegory: The Illuminated Landscapes of Mark Messersmith” will be on display through Sept. 24 at the Butler, 524 Wick Ave., Youngstown. Admission is free.