This BMA exhibit comes with a radical challenge: Give up your phone for 5 minutes

Stepping into the dark, I breathed in deeply.

The earthy smell of pine trees instantly transported me to my days as a preteen, playing manhunt for hours in the woods with neighborhood kids — a time before doomscrolling, targeted ads and constant notifications. My shoulders slumped. I grinned.

This was no dream: I had entered “Nature Deficit Disorder,” conceptual artist Rachel Lee Hovnanian’s immersive room installation inside the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Spring House.

Located on the campus’s west lawn, the annexed exhibition — which runs through the end of May — locks away a visitor’s cellphone for five minutes, forcing a distraction-free experience among trees, a floor of crunchy leaves, and one’s thoughts. It’s a cheeky reminder of what we gain when we put our phones away, even for a moment.

“I consider myself a humanist, so whatever I see that’s affecting our behavior or society, I really like to investigate it and do research, and then make work about it,” Hovnanian said on a recent spring morning outside the Spring House.

BMA visitors have made “Nature Deficit Disorder” a word-of-mouth hit — ironically thanks to TikTok and Instagram, said Katie Cooke, the exhibit’s curator. It’s the Spring House’s most attended show, Cooke said. A recent Saturday drew nearly 120 visitors.

Hovnanian, who grew up on an Ohio farm “making forts with my brothers” before moving to Austin, Texas, has long been interested in digital addiction. She, like so many of us, knows how tight a grip it can hold.

Her first installation, 2011’s “Dinner for Two,” was a bounty of fruits and vegetables on a long, elegantly dressed table. At the far ends stood two iPads set to the faces of a man and a woman, a commentary on the wedge technology drives between couples and intimacy.

Back then, people pushed back, saying Hovnanian was blowing it all out of proportion. “I said, ‘You know what? I’m pretty sure it’s going on because it’s happened to me.’”

“Nature Deficit Disorder” makes the viewer take action, surrendering their phone to a BMA staff member in a white lab coat. Before entering, visitors fill out a survey with questions like, “Do you feel anxiety, stress, isolation, or depression after going online?” (Take a guess how the majority reply.)

Thankfully, the exhibit has a sense of humor: Attendees are handed a sample of barbecue crickets — a shot of natural protein — and a urine specimen cup filled with Mountain Dew.

“Companies like to sell Mountain Dew as if it’s straight from the mountain, but it’s really chemicals and sugar,” she said. “So I like to play with that.”

Once inside, visitors hold a lantern to explore the room’s “nighttime forest” and its abundance of local Fraser fir and white pine trees. Tree stumps encourage contemplation, while live (contained) cockroaches and looping audio of cricket sounds add to the faux-realism.

The goal is to provide both a break from incessant app refreshing and a reconnection to nature, Hovnanian said.

Most attendees say they leave feeling more relaxed, Cooke said. “People really do seem to be craving that digital detox.”

“Nature Deficit Disorder” is a fitting capstone to the museum’s multiyear “Turn Again to the Earth” initiative, which has explored sustainability and climate change across numerous exhibitions. Once it concludes, the trees and leaves will be turned into mulch that the BMA will use on its grounds.

For Hovnanian, a classically trained sculptor who also paints, all of her work aims to “make a slight change in somebody’s way of thinking or feeling.” We won’t stop relying on our cellphones, but we can question the dependency they’ve created.

“Technology is amazing,” she said. “It keeps us connected, but it also can disconnect us and from ourselves.”