Oct 182024
 

Currently at VSF LA are Sarah Ippolito’s new colorful sculptures inspired by aquatic creatures for her exhibition Liquid Realm.

From the gallery-

The ocean is what makes the earth habitable, without the ocean life is not possible, “in a way we’re all sea creatures” – Sylvia Earle

Los Angeles-based Ippolito’s exuberantly biomorphic sculptures are inspired by time spent underwater, immersed in contemplation of the umwelt of aquatic creatures and the central role of the oceans in the health and wellbeing of people and our planet. Divided between the &Milk project space and the VSF courtyard, Ippolito’s exhibition considers the differing sensory environments and inhabitants of the sunlit shallows and the expansive open ocean. While the ocean covers more than 70% of the planet’s surface and contains roughly 97% of Earth’s biosphere, life underwater and the nature of the ocean often feels alien. Ippolito’s works bring some of this vibrancy and abundance onto dry land.

Color and texture are central to Ippolito’s work – her sculptures are recognizable not only for their uncanny and whimsical shapes, but for her use of bright color, evocative texture, and shifts in scale. For Ippolito, color expresses exuberance, optimism, and vitality. Intricate and tactile textured surfaces are dynamic and invite curiosity and engagement. Scale is used as a way to disrupt expected hierarchies, the viewer may feel they have been shrunk or the forms they look at magnified; each scale relationship impacts the experience of her body in space and in relationship to others. Scale is also a key in our relationship to the ocean – In its vastness, the ocean feels as unknowable as outer space and yet, somehow, it is also as familiar as our own backyards. The lively nature of Ippolito’s work is underscored by the use of active verbs in the titles for all of her new works: Filtering, Undulating, and Fanning their names describe the range of movement implied by their forms.

In the courtyard, Ippolito presents her first cast bronze sculpture. Standing at just about the same height as the artist, the form blends shapes and textures from a Salp spiral (phylum Chordata) and the tentacles of Portuguese man o’ war (phylum Cnidaria.) Both “creatures” are colonies of individual organisms. The bold cobalt-blue figure stands erect, its tentacles meandering and sensing its surroundings. Nearby an installation of hand-formed ceramic shapes represents a bloom of Phytoplankton – tiny single celled organisms that drift in the upper layer of the ocean using photosynthesis to transform carbon dioxide into oxygen. The word “plankton” comes from the Greek word for “drifter” or “wanderer.” It’s estimated that roughly 50% of the oxygen on Earth is produced by oceanic phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are the primary producers of the ocean – offering food for a range of organisms from small filter feeders like salps to massive whale sharks. Phytoplankton also play a crucial role in regulating the atmosphere in the biological carbon pump – absorbing carbon dioxide at the surface and as they die they sink to the bottom (marine snow) and sequester carbon in the deep ocean. The forms in this piece are inspired by the most abundant types of phytoplankton – the diatoms, dinoflagellates, green algae, cyanobacteria, and coccolithophores.

In &Milk a group of table-top scaled works and a large figural work inspired by a range of creatures from the phylum Cnidaria (sea anemones, jellyfish, coral, sea fans) and phylum Annelida (feather duster and tube worms) are on view. These are some of the earliest life forms to evolve on the planet after phytoplankton transformed the atmosphere of the Earth to one hospitable for animal life – appearing between about 635 million and 515 million years ago, they have survived 5 mass extinctions. Abounding with color, these animals are sometimes naturally pigmented or get their distinctive coloration from symbiotic algae that live in their tissues. They possess a unique form of intelligence; operating without a brain and sometimes with rudimentary eyes. With their flexible tentacles that are sensitive to the slightest touch and vibrations they reach into the open water to filter feed plankton or capture small prey.

By reimagining marine organisms and their adaptations, Ippolito invites viewers to explore the hidden wonders of our oceans and consider the interconnectedness of all life. Her creative practice, rooted in direct observation and scientific exploration, embodies the potential of art to spark environmental reflection. In a world where the health of our oceans is increasingly vital, Ippolito’s work reminds us of our deep connection to the vast liquid realm that defines our planet.

This exhibition closes 10/19/24.

Oct 172024
 

“Seventh Lagoon”, 1979

VSF gallery is currently showing The Harrisons’ Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth, Water, Interface: Annual Hog Pasture Mix, 1970-1971, part of The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art & Science Collide.

On Thursday, 10/17, a local pig will enter the grow box to turn over the pasture in an iteration of the 2012 performance that took place at The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA.

From the gallery-

The first in their visionary series of Survival Pieces, “Hog Pasture,” as it is known by Harrison’s fans, emerged from a direct dialog with the most visionary and boundary pushing artists of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The impact of the Earth Day movement and the nascent cultural awareness that human beings were rapidly depleting the planet’s natural resources ignited a deep and sincere conversation within the art world about the stakes of art-making in the post-war, post-1968 world.

While later survival pieces highlighted a culminating harvest feast, Survival Piece #1 is focused on growth. The rectangular form of the raised planter bed and the grid of grow lights above echo sculptural innovations by artists like Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Richard Morris;  however, Newton Harrison had by this time decided that a sculpture or a painting was not enough. His artwork needed to not only have a moral purpose, it needed to strive to restore the earth and protect the abundant future of humans on our planet.

In 1971, shortly after their first foray into ecological art, Making Earth (which VSF exhibited earlier this year at Frieze LA and is now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) Newton and Helen heard from David Antin that Virginia Gunter at the MFA Boston was curating a show titled Earth, Air, Fire, and Water: Elements of Art and wanted to include their work alongside contemporaries including Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Hans Haacke, and others. Exploring ideas of growth and change, Gunter’s vision for the exhibition was meant to challenge conservative, formalist, Greenbergian ideas about art as well as expectations of the museum as an institution that primarily collected unchanging pictures and objects that somehow articulated the best ideas and techniques of the time in which they were made.

Interested in building on his use of artificial lights, Newton decided that he should actually grow something. He commissioned one of his painting students to look through seed catalogs to find a mixture that was “totally singular,” eventually landing on R.H. Shumway Seedsman’s Annual Hog Pasture Mix. In Boston, a large raised planter bed was built in a basement gallery of the museum, agricultural grow lights were installed in a parallel grid from the ceiling, a potent mix of manure, compost, worm castings, and other rich grow media were added to the planter bed, the seed mix was added, and a small pasture grew there with alarming speed. While Gunter wouldn’t allow a hog to come and graze the original hog pasture, subsequent exhibitions of the work, including Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 curated by Miwon Kwon and Phillip Kaiser at MoCA in 2012, have brought the work to its natural conclusion and invited a pig in to enjoy the rich, velvety mix of legumes and grasses. Similarly, VSF has invited a hog to harvest the indoor meadow during the exhibition’s closing ceremony on October 17, 2024. The remaining pasture, earthworms, and soil mix will be gifted to visitors.

Oct 162024
 

Lita Albuquerque’s exhibition of new work for Earth Skin, on view at Michael Kohn Gallery, includes several dramatic blue paintings and a huge installation piece on the floor of the gallery that grabs your attention the moment you enter the gallery.

From the gallery-

Beginning her career in the 1970s with works that intimately connected her to the earth, Albuquerque’s artistic evolution envelops the cosmos and the space between it and us. Her work emanates from years of practicing the exact science of Kundalini breath technique as well as automatic writing; both drive a deep investigation and scientific inquiry of who we are as individual beings on this planet. Albuquerque further connects to the exactness of physics by a meditation she, and astronomers, call the cosmic address. These daily practices are at the root of her art, precisely positioning self to cosmos. It is those discoveries she embeds in works of art that permit us, the viewer, to experience the connections she has made between these internal and external worlds.

Thinking about the exhibition, Albuquerque writes:
Feet dancing above the earth, dancing with fervor, drumming, the increasing drumming of the feet not fragile on the fragile earth.

The wisps of bodies, like skins falling off their frames leaving the planet, the planet strong and our forms ethereal, the strength of us, our feet, on the fragile earth, the wispy lightness of us, detached from the earth, transforming into space.

The earth strong behind us, propelling us upward, giving us her strength, throwing us in the air, while we fly, never falling, the fierce intensity of our rhythm while alive, and the freedom of release from the earth.

Experiments of intensities of emotions and colors, whirling dervishes’ cyclones, Earth Skin is whispered, “Earth Skin” she whispered.

For PST’s Art and Science Collide, Albuquerque transforms the gallery with a titular installation, Earth Skin. A membrane of decomposed granite fills the space creating the illusory sensation of the earth being revealed below the gallery, as if the concrete floor has been meticulously removed. Accompanying this installation is a new series of paintings revolving around the gestures of the body and ancient marks, like a hieroglyphic code only the artist has a key for. With each gesture, Albuquerque embraces the tactile intimacy of painting, reminding us of the power of capturing and transforming the elusive into the material. This installation invites viewers to explore the shared fragility of humanity and earth.

Two of the paintings, picutred below, include poems referencing fellow artist Ana Mendieta, who was known in part for her “earth-body” work and who passed away tragically in 1985.

“Propelling Us Upwards, She, The Earth, Throwing Us In The Air While We Fly, Never Falling, A Poem for A.M.”, 2024, Pigment on Canvas

“Desire and Memory, A Poem for A.M.”, 2024, Pigment on canvas

This exhibition is part of The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art and Science Collide an arts event taking place in various venues around Southern California.

For more information on Lita Albuquerque and her work Red Canary Magazine recently published an excellent article that is worth a read as well.

Jul 252024
 

Canton Museum of Art’s Spring/Summer Exhibitions include three artists who have created engaging new worlds for visitors to explore.

Ginny Ruffner’s sculptures hide colorful surprises in her exhibition Reforestation of the Imagination. Working with animator and media artist Grant Kirkpatrick, they have created digitally animated fictional plants that burst from the certain sections of the works when using their app on your phone (the museum will also loan you a tablet if you need one). Ruffner has also provided delightful descriptions for these creations, as well as her drawings.

From the museum-

Imagine an apocalyptic landscape. It appears barren, devastated, and hopeless. It is not.

In this traveling exhibition from the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, internationally renowned artist Ginny Ruffner creates a seemingly bleak environment that suddenly evolves into a thriving floral oasis by combining traditional sculpture with augmented reality (AR) technology. In collaboration with animator and media artist Grant Kirkpatrick, Ruffner brings to life a colorful world where glass stumps suddenly sprout mythical flora that have adapted to their surrounding conditions in unexpected, beautiful and optimistic ways. By transforming the CMA lower galleries into a multidimensional experience, Ginny Ruffner: Reforestation of the Imagination calls into question the very notions of reality and fantasy, of concrete and abstract, and of desolation and hope.

Ginny Ruffner is among a vibrant group of artists bringing AR to museum installations. By using this technology as another art media, she transforms visitor experiences. The installation consists of landmasses featuring intricate handblown glass sculptures of tree stumps, with painted tree rings that function as discrete QR codes. These islands surround a landmass that supports a large fiberglass stump sprouting beautifully grotesque bronze and glass appendages. Other than the central stump and the painted shelf mushrooms and tree rings on the surrounding stumps, the scene appears colorless and desolate; however, when viewed through AR’s technological lens an alternate landscape is revealed.

Visitors can download the free app “Reforestation” on their phones or use the iPads in the gallery to bring this second reality to life. When the tree rings of a stump are viewed through the device’s camera lens, a hologram of a fictional plant appears to sprout from the sculpture. These imagined fruits and flowers have evolved from existing flora, developing dramatic appendages and skills necessary to flourish in this radically different environment. In this reality, tulips develop stem flexibility, pears contain windows to the outside world and flowers take on the form of birds. The installation includes Ruffner’s tongue-in-cheek descriptions of her fanciful flora and their remarkable, sometimes humorous adaptations, as well as 19 original drawings by the artist that were the inspiration for the AR images.

“This is nature reimagining itself,” said Ruffner. “The imagination cannot be exterminated. It just re-creates itself. To me, ‘Reforestation’ is about hope.”

The intricate porcelain works Janice Jakielski created for her exhibition Impossible Objects are reminiscent of papercut art. Through her unique ceramic process (detailed in the Ceramics Monthly article linked below) the delicate work takes traditional objects and presents them in new and intriguing ways.

From the museum-

Janice Jakielski is a Massachusetts (soon to be Colorado) based sculptor. By inventing new ways of casting and manipulating ultra-thin porcelain sheets she can create impossible objects of curiosity, beautiful objects to provide focus, retreat and pause in an overwhelming world.  Using meticulous detail, familiar forms and uncertain function she coaxes her audience to draw near, closing the physical gap between viewer and object.  In this way the details of workmanship and the excessive fragility of the porcelain act as a whisper, flirtatiously demanding investigation. Her impossible objects were also featured in the January 2021 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

For Laine Bachman’s paintings for Beyond Worlds, she has created detailed environments filled with creatures and color.

From the museum and the artist-

Suspended in the ether of some surreal galaxy, the worlds I create give a glimpse into flora and fauna that exist in a hidden interplanetary realm.  Each is a themed bouquet where I explore and study different species that exist in our own world.  I relish the details of their structures and include many forms of life I find fascinating. I approach each piece as a puzzle with parts that can coexist, painting a picture of a precious ecosystem that becomes more complex as the work evolves.  One may find a frog nestled below a fern or a mole napping under a toadstool. There are many creatures and plants we recognize from the past and some that have yet to be discovered. Creating these planets has been a journey to capture the beauty of nature and elevate small moments that may otherwise go unseen. Though they reside in the mire of a newly formed galaxy, they are truly a celebration of our world and the life that exists within it.”- Laine Bachman

As a young child growing up in a once flourishing town in the Rust Belt of Ohio, Laine Bachman always had an affinity towards drawing and painting. Her parents encouraged her creativity from the beginning which led to her attending art school in nearby Columbus, receiving a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in painting in 1997.

Often inspired by myths and folklore, Bachman infuses the worlds she creates with archetypal imagery, underlying themes, decorative motifs, and meticulous details. Working in watercolor and acrylics, her paintings are full of creatures and landscapes, real or imagined, that are all part of the larger story behind her work. Bachman’s work, recognized as Magical Realism, is greatly influenced by Henri Rosseau and his flat, lush, and detailed landscapes and also by surrealist Frida Kahlo.

Representations of life, death, beauty, innocence, and evil are depicted in Bachman’s work.  Whether it’s animals, insects, birds or favored objects, they become symbols of different expressions.  As owls are a symbol for wisdom or butterflies can represent a transformation, it’s this kind of idea behind the creatures that helps them tell a part of the whole story.

The works expose unique environments in which to explore and pay homage to the various forms of life that Bachman finds fascinating and mysterious in nature. Vast landscapes are used to showcase these life forms, showing the spaces between and the surfaces above and below. The worlds she creates are hidden and untouched by man, and give the viewer a glimpse into the secret lives of their peculiar inhabitants.

These exhibitions close 7/28/24.

The museum is free all day on Thursdays and tonight, 7/25, is the last of their Virtual Reality Nights. From 4-8pm you can create your own reality with VR headsets, guided by a CMA educator.

Jul 052024
 

Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, at the Museum of Modern Art, showcases the artist’s long and varied career. The exhibition includes her videos as well as props, sculptures, paintings and drawings. It’s a celebration of her collaborations (including Volcano Saga with actress Tilda Swinton), performances, installations, and her use of play to create all of these inventive works.

From the museum-

“I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance,” Joan Jonas has said. For more than five decades, Jonas’s multidisciplinary work has bridged and redefined boundaries between performance, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation. The most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States, Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning traces the full breadth of her career, from works that explore the encounter between performance and technology to recent installations about ecology and the landscape.

Jonas began her decades-long career in New York’s vibrant Downtown art scene of the 1960s and ’70s, where she was one of the first artists to work in performance and video. Drawing influence from literature, Noh and Kabuki theater, and art history, her early experimental works probed how a given element—be it distance, mirrors, the camera, or even wind—could transform one’s perception.

Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning presents drawings, photographs, notebooks, oral histories, film screenings, performances, and a selection of the artist’s installations. Jonas continues to produce her most urgent work through immersive multimedia installations that address climate change and kinship between species. “Despite my interest in history,” she has said, “my work always takes place in the present.”

The museum’s website has several videos of her work online, as well as an interview with the Jonas in her NYC loft (seen below).

Art21 also has some great videos worth checking out to learn more.

The exhibition at MoMa closes 7/6/24.

May 242024
 

“After Storm in the Fen”, 2024, Oil on canvas

“Squall Lines”, 2024, Oil on canvas

For Rachel MacFarlane’s exhibition, Coming Events Cast Their Light Before Them, at Hollis Taggart, she has painted several dreamlike landscapes based on her travels to places impacted by climate events. She first creates maquettes from her observations (three are on view) and then uses them as the basis for the paintings.

From the press release-

At its core, MacFarlane’s work is about lamenting the loss of specific landscapes through creating and depicting new worlds where humans are no longer the protagonists. MacFarlane spends much of her time immersed in unique geographical environments – often ones that have been heavily impacted by climate change-related weather events. While working on her newest body of work, MacFarlane spent extensive time in places ranging from the Adirondacks to Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park in Maine, and from Prince Edward Island right after it had been hit by Hurricane Fiona to Clearwater, Manitoba during unprecedented flooding. As has always been her practice, MacFarlane does not document while she travels, instead preferring to absorb the atmosphere of a place and spend time really immersed in its sights and sounds. Upon returning to her studio, MacFarlane transforms her observations into three-dimensional maquettes created out of paper, paint, and plastic.

As MacFarlane describes it, a lot of play takes place at her collage table, as she manufactures new spaces based loosely on the spirit of specific ones, drawing on a myriad of influences from theatre and architecture to the world-building of science fiction literature and movies. The paintings in this show were specifically influenced by MacFarlane’s research into the Augsburg Book of Miracles, a manuscript depicting celestial and weather phenomena made in Augsburg, Germany in the sixteenth century. MacFarlane was moved and inspired by how these anonymous illustrators centuries before her were also dedicated to tracking warning signs in the landscape and to recording them in creative ways.

While she describes the model-building as a distancing method, it is also one that creates intimacy, as the scale shift to a shallow box model leads to the creation of a miniature world we can literally hold in our hands versus the enormity of the environment. After MacFarlane distills the memory of a place into an object, she further transforms it into its final form on the canvas, using bold colors and thick brushwork that highlights the painterliness and artifice of her landscapes. As art critic Barry Schwabsky notes in the catalogue essay, these multiple translations and transformations allow MacFarlane to “operate with and against flatness and depth, illusion and physicality, naturalness and theatricality… Her work gives pleasure but also warns that with all these unavoidable antitheses, the choice of one pole or the other would be hopeless, and we have to learn to live with the tensions between them.”

This exhibition closes 5/25/24.

May 222024
 

Artist and activist Andrea Bowers is based in Los Angeles but was born and raised in Ohio. This provides the connection to the work in Exist, Flourish, Evolve, currently on view at moCa Cleveland, which advocates for environmental protections for the area. The educational material informs the viewer, while the artwork reminds us how much beauty there is to lose.

From the museum-

LA-based artist Andrea Bowers bears witness in her work, drawing attention to and inspiring movement around the most urgent issues of our time. Her drawings, sculptures, installations, and films chronicle and preserve history as it occurs, documenting collective action and amplifying the labor and lived experiences of activists dedicated to socio-political change.

Developed through an ongoing partnership with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and activist Tish O’Dell, Exist, Flourish, Evolve is a new, multi-site, multimedia campaign that builds awareness and action around the dangers facing Lake Erie and all of the Great Lakes ecosystems. It features a monumental neon sculpture installed on a waterfront balcony of the Great Lakes Science Center; a documentary investigating the impact of factory farming on Lake Erie’s ecosystem; and a presentation in moCa’s Lewis Gallery that includes a newly-created drawing of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, first-of-its-kind legislation protecting an entire US ecosystem that is part of the global Rights of Nature Movement.

Bowers was raised in the small town of Huron, Ohio and spent her childhood on the shores of Lake Erie, connecting to the lake itself like a member of her family to be cared for, cherished, and protected. Yet, Lake Erie and its watershed are abused and endangered by corporate practices such as contaminant dumping, toxic runoff from industrial farming, and the introduction of non-native invasive species. Exist, Flourish, Evolve demands justice for the Great Lakes, urging us to prioritize the preservation of our natural ecology over industrialization and capitalism.

Within moCa’s gallery, a timeline connects Bowers’s new and recent artworks with historical facts and archival materials using two catastrophic climate events as bookends to Bowers’s life thus far: the 1969 fire on the Lake Erie-connected Cuyahoga River (a result of oil slicks covering the water) and the massive 2014 algae bloom that blanketed Lake Erie and invaded Toledo’s water systems, preventing residents from using tap water.

From the Maumee to the Cuyahoga, the works in Exist, Flourish, Evolve come together to share the histories of our water, demonstrate the interconnectedness of ourselves and our natural world, and remind us, as Dr. Vandana Shiva states, “nature is not out there; we are a part of it.”

 

This exhibition closes 5/25/24.

Apr 192024
 

Meryl Engler, “Lying in Red”, 2023, Woodcut

Work by Michael Loderstedt (left), Eva Pozler (center) and Lori Kella (right)

Work by Lori Kella, Maria Uhase, and Meryl Engler (right two pieces)

Lori Kella, “Mudslide and Forsythia”, 2022, Inkjet print (left) and Corrie Slawson, “Amalgam 4”, 2022 (top) and “Amalgam 3”, 2022 (bottom), Oil and screenprint on plywood

Today (4/19/24) is the last day to see Life Out of Balance at the Emily Davis Gallery at The University of Akron. The group show show includes work by Maria Uhase, Meryl Engler, Lori Kella, Benjamin Lambert, Michael Loderstedt, Eve Polzer, Ron Shelton, Ariel Bowman, and Corrie Slawson.

From the gallery-

When a tree falls in a forest, we may see it as the death of the tree. It stops photosynthesizing, growing, feeding its mycorrhizal symbionts, flowering, developing fruit, dispersing seeds, taking in carbon dioxide, and producing oxygen. But in the ecosystem, it begins a whole new life in decay. It feeds the soil and microbes through the decomposition of its tissues; it provides a place for fungi, mosses, and lichens to grow; and it becomes a protected habitat for a myriad of insects, mammals, and birds. This same tree, therefore, can be both dying and living at the same time, depending on perspective. It can be dead if considered separate from its surroundings, or it can be alive in its continued relationship within its ecosystem.

Humans can feel more alive by being integrated with the rest of the natural world. We are not living to our full potential, or allowing nature to be its full potential, when we consider ourselves as separate from it.

If we are to have hope for solving the complex environmental issues that are facing us today, we need to work with, rather than against, the forces of nature.

Below are a few more selections.

Ron Shelton, “Yellow Mosaic”, 2021, Plastic and wire

Ariel Bowman, “Wall Trophy Series”, 2019, (Cave Bear, Antique Bison, Early Horse, Saber Cat, Dodo, Brontotherium, Parasaurolophus), Unglazed, high fired porcelain; Maria Uhase, “Splitting Headache”, 2022 Ink on paper and “Softly”, 2023, Graphite on paper

Ariel Bowman, “Wall Trophy Series”, 2019, (Cave Bear, Antique Bison, Early Horse, Saber Cat, Dodo, Brontotherium, Parasaurolophus), Unglazed, high fired porcelain

Benjamin Lambert, “A pint for a gallon”, 2020 and “I Found Your Damn Lost Shaker of Salt”, 2020, Stoneware, underglaze, glaze, epoxy

Corrie Slawson, “Stage Set Tapestry 1, for Feast: a ballet. Of Bats, Blue Footed Boobies, Penguins and other threatened fauna and flora. Pastoral landscape after Rubens”, 2020, Oil and mixed media on muslin

Corrie Slawson, “Stage Set Tapestry 1, for Feast: a ballet. Of Bats, Blue Footed Boobies, Penguins and other threatened fauna and flora. Pastoral landscape after Rubens” (detail)

Michael Loderstedt, “Snakehead”, 2023, “Thistles”, 2023, Cyanotypes on fabric, embroidery, fabric collage

Lori Kella, “Mayflies in the Grass”, and “Yellow Irises”, 2024, Framed inkjet prints

Maria Uhase, “Encircled”, 2023, Oil on linen panel, “Worm”,2023, Oil on linen and “Conglomeration in the Spiders’ Ghost Town”, 2020, Oil on canvas

Eva Polzer, “Gift from a Cat”, 2024, Ceramic, underglaze, velvet jewelry box, and “Gift from a Rat”, 2024, Ceramic, underglaze, petri dish

Meryl Engler, “Waiting”,2023, Woodcut Block

 

Apr 182024
 

There’s an unsettling tension in the room that houses Mel Chin’s installation Spirit (1994), at the Columbus Museum of Art. Is the rope strong enough to support the barrel? What will be its breaking point?

Some details from the museum about the work-

The rope that seems to carry the weight of Spirit’s enormous cask is made from tallgrass. This native plant was once central to a vast prairie ecosystem spanning over 170 million acres of North America. By 1930, most all of this was decimated as a result of agricultural and industrial settlement, and what remains is protected habitat (Chin received special permission to harvest a portion for this sculpture).

Wooden barrels are traditionally used to measure and transport dry goods like grain, beans, as well as beer, oil and wine, and were central to the process of European settlement and trade in North America. Here, the image of this rope bearing such a massive weight suggests the precarious status of nature in a world of outsized human development. Even the gallery walls, which curve inwards on all sides, seem to respond to the strain.

 

Apr 122024
 

“Erika”, 2021, VCT, shotgun shells, and drink stirrers

“Duke the Fisherman’s High Quality Fluke Rigs Made in the USA™”, 2022, Found tampon applicators, fishing line, fishing hooks, nail polish, peg board, card stock

Detail of “Monument to Five Thousand Years of Temptation and Deception V, VI, VII”, 2022, Salvaged plastic, paint, fishhooks

The images above are from Duke Riley’s exhibition DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash, on view at Brooklyn Museum in 2023. The artist’s inventive fishing lures, made from discarded plastic items found around waterways, are engaging to look at but highlight the grim reality of how much garbage is polluting our natural environment.

From the museum-

In DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash, Brooklyn-based artist Duke Riley uses materials collected from beaches in the northeastern United States to tell a tale of both local pollution and global marine devastation. Riley’s contemporary interpretations of historical maritime crafts—such as scrimshaw, sailor’s valentines, and fishing lures—confront the catastrophic effect that the oil, food, and beverage industries have had on the environment through single-use plastics. The works are presented in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jan Martense Schenck and Nicholas Schenck Houses, alongside a selection of historical scrimshaw from our collection, directly connecting environmental injustices past and present.

In his contemporary interpretations of scrimshaw—ink drawings etched into bone by sailors—Riley replaces the medium’s customary whale teeth with repurposed plastic containers, detergent bottles, toothbrushes, and other waste. The works incorporate the maritime imagery traditional to scrimshaw, but expand it to portray international business executives that the artist identifies as responsible for the perpetuation of single-use plastics. Also on view are Riley’s fishing lures and sailor’s valentines, similarly created with detritus found on northeast coastal beaches. The exhibition juxtaposes corporation-driven pollution with new short films by Riley that highlight New York community members working to remediate plastic damage and restore our waterways.

Erika, the mosaic pictured above, depicts the 1999 shipwreck of MV Erika which, after splitting in two during a heavy storm, released thousands of tons of oil into the Bay of Biscay off the coast of Brittany.

In the video below, Riley gives a brief tour of the Brooklyn show.

Some of the work from this exhibition is currently on view at Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg as part of their exhibition, The Nature of Art.