MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

January 17, 2022

This week we recognize the work of artist  Diane Burko. 

Highlighted are a selection of works from her recent solo exhibition titled "Diane Burko: Seeing Climate Change," curated by Mary D. Garrard and Norma Broude, which was on view at the American University Museum from August 28, 2021 - December 12, 2021. The exhibition was included in the New York Times' list of Best Art Exhibitions of 2021.

"What is so amazing about my studio practice now that I’m in my 70s is the new kind of freedom I feel to do whatever - to experiment and play with new materials and tools. New possibilities opened up with my using acrylic paints instead of oils, with the current Reef project. And with the canvas repositioned horizontally - no longer vertically on a wall - has come radical changes in my process. These actions with new material and tools have introduced possibilities I had never imagined.”

"[The World Map Series is a] 56-foot-long suite of paintings. It melds my long-time interest in cartography with my deep concern for our environment being increasingly threatened by climate change. My practice is devoted to this issue. In the early 2000’s, I first investigated the polar region’s melting glaciers. Now I’ve turned my attention to our oceans coral reef ecosystems."

"Being that climate change is a global problem I decided to take on the whole world at once by referencing a world map of glaciers, followed with a map of all the reefs in the world. Each was formatted with a horizontal freeze going across the top, on a 50’ x 88“ canvas. One painting just seemed to lead to another variation until there were six of them. I then decided that each category needed a visual conclusion - a square 50” x 50“ for each suite. However, in June I decided each still needed an exclamation point - so I added another 2 feet to each resulting in a 56 foot long series of paintings."

Also included in "Seeing Climate Change" was a series of lenticular prints, what Burko refers to as "time-based media."

"This first series was created in 2017 in collaboration with Anna Tas, an artist whose métier is 'lenticular.' Together we combined her technical knowledge as well as aesthetic skills, with my on-site experience of bearing witness in the field and in research labs. These circular presentations are referential - providing multiple interpretations spanning a submarine’s 'portal' view under water, a satellite’s aerial perspective to a microscope’s revealing lens. Each piece utilizes the interactive nature of metaphor, inviting the viewer to contemplate and discover. The seductive beauty furthers the conversation about how the natural world is impacted by climate change. Technically, a lenticular print consists of 30 individual frames that are interlaced to become the dynamic image you see before you."

Diane Burko focuses on monumental geological phenomena. Since 2006, her practice has been at the intersection of art, science and the environment, devoted to the urgent issues of climate change. Her work about glacial melt reflects expeditions to the three largest ice fields in the world. Burko is now focusing on the world’s oceans and the dramatic bleaching of coral reef ecosystems. She continually gains knowledge through visiting research labs and engaging with scientists at institutions such as the Norwegian Polar Institute, INSTAAR in Boulder, Colorado, the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Tasmania, the Hawaiian Institute of Marine Biology, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Erik Cordes Lab at Temple University in Philadelphia. Burko is committed to public engagement. She makes herself available to wide audiences in an effort to convey her experiences and share her knowledge about the ways global warming impacts our planet. dianeburko.com

Featured Images: ©Diane Burko, "Unprecedented" (2021), “Reef Map 1” (2019), "World Map Series" (2019), "From Glaciers to Reefs" (2018), "Summer Heat 2" (2020).

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

January 10, 2022

This week we recognize the work of artist Robin Lasser. Since 2004, Lasser has been collaborating with fellow artist Adrienne Pao on the Dress Tent project.

"We are interested in the land and the body as sites of seduction. Dress Tents are a fusion of architecture, the body and the land played out through living sculpture, moving images and still photography. The Dress Tent project investigates desire from a female centered perspective and uses seduction as a vehicle to explore the relationship between the body and the land."

By referencing modes of female representation such as “bare foot and in the kitchen” in the Picnic Dress Tent, or “mother nature” in the Greenhouse Dress Tent, the dress tents simultaneously utilize and address a history of fantasy associated with women. Through pop-culture humor, the Picnic Dress Tent examines our recreational activities in the landscape though playfully familiar scenarios that leave us to question and reexamine our flow of routine and our relationship to the body as site of cultural desire. A play on green house gasses and what it takes to be "green" in contemporary culture, the Greenhouse Dress Tent becomes a commentary on the current fashion of being “green.”

The Ice Queen: Glacial Retreat Dress Tent, photographed at Mt. Shasta, California underneath one of the few advancing glaciers in the world, embodies the look of a sexy weather hazard/emergency worker in her white winter garb. The dress tent is a polar weather station and research lab, offering a space to ponder the earth, global warming, and glaciers. Underneath her skirt, a chorus of crickets varies their tune, in direct relationship to the climatic changes that have occurred across the globe, from the industrial revolution to the present and beyond. Overlaid upon the cricket chirping are weather reports from the locale in which the tent is stationed, as well as a weather reporter adding commentary on the ice queen's current temperature and state of mind.

Salty Water: South Bay Salt Ponds Dress Tent, celebrates a Bay Area environmental victory: the restoration of the artificially-made salt ponds flanking the southern shores of the bay back to its original wetlands eco system. As far as changing the physical structure of southern San Francisco Bay, no industry, not even waste disposal, has had as great an impact as salt production. More of the south bay has been diked and ponded for salt than not. Salty Water Dress Tent, as an intervention in this landscape, becomes a marker for this important transition of the land back to its original state.

Robin Lasser is an artist residing in Oakland, California. She is currently a Professor of Art at San Jose State University. Lasser produces photographs, video, site-specific installations and public art dealing with socially and culturally significant imagery and themes. Lasser often works in a collaborative mode with other artists, writers, students, public agencies, community organizations, and international coalitions to produce public art and promote public dialogue. Lasser exhibits her work nationally and internationally. robinlasser.com dresstents.com

Featured Images: ©Robin Lasser, Dress Tents, 2004-ongoing.

Tatter, issue 3 : Blue

A Blue of Bioluminescence

Photographic investigations of ostracods.

Words and images by Margaret LeJeune.

Under a waxing moon, my partner and I sailed our 37-foot sailboat, Bear, down the Chesapeake from Annapolis to Solomons Island. The sky was inky and the water flat calm for the last few hours. As per tradition, we set the anchor and hopped in our dinghy to go to shore for a celebratory cocktail. As we pulled away from Bear, the waters around the dinghy began to light up like fireworks reflecting in a pool. Brilliant blue light danced on the surface. This was my first experience up close and personal with bioluminescent dinoflagellates, and it spurred my cross-species creative research with this incredible light source.  

That summer changed the way I thought about the ocean. It was the first season that we lived aboard our boat, traveling, working, entertaining, and recreating by the weather and tides. The rhythm of the sea became the rhythm of our lives, dictating our movements and moods. The bioluminescent sighting set off a flurry of synapses and a flood of curiosity that fueled my desire to better understand marine ecology and the interconnections of life. 

The following year we added Solomons Island to our sailing itinerary again, so that I could spend more time with the sparkling seas. I returned to the same anchorage at the same time of year, excited to see the bioluminescence. I was met with disappointment. The blue was absent.

The following fall, I returned back to my academic position at Bradley University in Peoria, IL, with a need to understand why the blue light had been snuffed from the sea. I received a grant from the university to start a new research project investigating the power of bioluminescent organisms in the field of photography. I titled the project Growing Light; and I began by culturing the dinoflagellate Pyrocystis fusiformis, which are similar to the organisms I saw in the Chesapeake Bay. These single-cell marine plankton can generate a bright blue flash of light using a luciferin-luciferase chemical reaction. This biological capacity appears to be useful for startling potential predators, and it is commonly seen in the wave action at popular tourist sites, including Mosquito Bay in Vieques, Puerto Rico and Sam Mun Tsai Beach in Hong Kong.

Continue reading on Tatter HERE

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

January 3, 2022

This week we recognize the work of artists  Wendy DesChene and Jeff Schmuki, aka PlantBot Genetics.

DesChene and Schmuki operate under the guise of PlantBot Genetics Inc., a parody of Big Agricultural Firms who skillfully manipulate current food production and distribution systems.

"PlantBot Genetics combines tactical media and public space to promote critical thinking and political action on environmental issues. By imitating actual corporate practice, we underscore the potential consequences of the global corporatization of agriculture, the natural environment, and public space. Our products underscore the lack of transparency and corporate ‘grafting’ of food production and distribution by releasing humorous next-generation, robot-plant hybrids to prompt critical discussion on the environmental costs of intensive agricultural practices.”

"If there were one word to explain what PlantBot Genetics is about, it would have to be PlantBots. Billions of people depend on what farmers do and in the future farmers will have to grow more food than they have in the past 10,000 years. We work alongside farmers to meet the demands of the future in sowing the seeds developed through synthetic biotechnology and automated chemical protection."

“PlantBots are better suited to the 21st century. Our ability to manufacture PlantBots that can adapt and mutate to a wide range of climates will ensure unsurpassed yields. PlantBot Genetics inserts valid traits and materials from specific flora and fauna found in each locale. Several species designed by PlantBot Genetics have self-sown and contaminated the surrounding quadrants outside our lab. These rogue PlantBots may prove useful and have been captured in the following footage.”

Wendy DesChene (Canada) and Jeff Schmuki (USA), collaborative team and married partners, began practicing asPlantBot Genetics in 2008. Each had extensive experience and awards as solo artists and both were raised with strong connections to the land around them. PlantBot Genetics create installations, interventions, and collaborations that combine activism, research, and social space in order to foster discussion and generate action in the area of ecological awareness. By linking environmental issues to a diverse array of creative operations and tactics, DesChene + Schmuki extend the “knowledge of the moment”, demonstrates the fragile connection between the natural world and personal action, and offers simple, positive changes that can be enacted to increase sustainability -- an activity that can be replicated long after the artists have moved on. monsantra.com

Featured Images: ©PlantBot Genetics, Monsantra, Dinosauria,Floridada, and Spores, 2008-ongoing

The ecoartspace January 2022 e-Newsletter is HERE

Image credit: David Allen Burns and Austin Young / Fallen Fruit, ‘Los Angelitos de Nuestra Señora del Jardin,” asynchronous repeat pattern, archival watercolor inks printed on organic fabric, dimensions variable, commissioned by the Vallarta Botanical Garden, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, 2021.

Interview with Fallen Fruit by Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein

Combining place-based research, fantastical eden-like installation artworks and community activism, the collaborative behind Fallen Fruits has transformed the meaning of what art can do and provide for its audience. These artworks live and grow providing both nourishment for the body and soul by creating public resources that approach topics of displacement, immigration, and legality. All of this held within the colorful, inviting peels of a topic everyone can relate to: fruit! Fallen Fruit is a collaborative art project originally conceived in 2004 by David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. Since 2013, David Burns and Austin Young have continued the collaborative work. David Burns and Austin Young discuss their international projects, inspirations and process.
 
Thank you so much for taking the time for this interview! It is absolutely thrilling to speak with you on your work. Let’s start at the beginning: how did the fruits come to fruition?

In 2004, Fallen Fruit began as a response to an open-call for submission for volume three of The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. The basic question was asked, “is it possible to use the agency of activism, but without opposition?”

We realized our response had to be something we already knew and something we were not paying attention to. We walked our neighborhood of Silverlake in north east Los Angeles, and discovered that over 100 fruit trees were growing in public spaces. Along alleys, sidewalks, and often branches of fruit trees planted on private property were abundantly overhanging fences well into public right-of-way. We mapped these publicly accessible fruit trees and wrote a text that questions who has a right to the fruit from these trees and who has the right to public space. We called the submission “Fallen Fruit” and this began our collaborative work. 

People are so disconnected from each other in Los Angeles - we had the idea this would create social connections. Get out of the car, off the cell phone, and meet neighbors. We also realized we could activate the margins of public space to share resources like fruit bearing trees.

During our interventions, people would tell family histories and stories about fruit. People were excited to connect with their family and cultural rituals, the natural world, and each other. In the end, we created a call to action that could benefit everyone, including the environment, and it does not make anyone wrong.

We have been working on this project for over 17 years now. The project is always collaborative, the artworks are process oriented and research based. We do not have a studio and the work is always site specific. We have a philosophy that what we create is a body of artwork that is living and growing - literally and figuratively. 

Image credit: Artists David Allen Burns and Austin Young with Curator Catherine Flood researching the V&A's botanical drawings collection. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2019.

It is so exciting to see work that surpasses the limits of the traditional gallery and into an activist space that, as you say, “does not make anyone wrong.” And the title “Fallen Fruit” is so distinctive. What led to this title and how has this title led your collaborative work?

FALLEN FRUIT is from Leviticus. It references an old Roman law:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest.

You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.

At first, we took this message literally. Drawing maps, walking cities, and thinking about messages of sharing and generosity. We explored the real world in real time and focused on fruit trees growing on the margins of public space in neighborhoods around the world. And everywhere we are invited to make art, we learn deeply about people and places.

…everywhere we are invited to make art, we learn deeply about people and places.

In our current work, we are focused on research based installation artworks. These works are also about place and activate historic collections, original photography, and now uses limits of architecture as the frame. The works explore collective meanings, cultural mythologies, and celebrate geographical locations. Our art and process has expanded in dynamic ways. We are exploring issues of identity, cultural memory, and historical artifacts. We love nuances of collective histories that synthesize concepts in themes of legacy and the public realm.

For example, we have discovered that history is often bi-located, meaning that what is written and told as the historic truth and located geography is often actually in reference to something that happened elsewhere or its original thought is actually from somewhere else. Like the quote from Leviticus is an old Roman Law. Or that fruit moved westward with pioneers following and Manifest Destiny  - an idea that originated in the eastern states of the United States, but it was culturally actualized in a racially motivated movement to the west terminating in Portland, Oregon to be specific aka “the Oregon Trail.”

Image credit: David Allen Burns and Austin Young / Fallen Fruit, “Paradise,” documentation image, recontextualized selections from the permanent collection with custom made repeat pattern wallcovering,  dimensions variable, commissioned by Portland Art Museum, Porland, Oregon, USA, 2015.

Our artworks are sometimes constructed from reorganizing found objects and objectifying the mythology referents of these objects. Our collective ‘perception of truth’ and how these interpretations relate to found objects… and ultimately how authorship and interpretation of meaning informs identity and place.

Your work has quite a range! From living plants to found objects to collage and to repeat pattern installation design. But all of your work seems to have to do with people and connecting people. What role does identity play in your work?

We believe in complex nuances of the familiar that celebrates people and places. We are focused on the importance of beauty and levity at this time. The asynchronous repeat patterns are carefully constructed and created from diligent on the ground research. We consider them to be portraits of a place -perhaps a city, a neighborhood, or even a garden.

Our work has always been about connecting people. We consider our art to be a form of portraiture -- whether that be a map, or an immersive installation artwork, or a language score. We also recognize that everything we do is a collaboration -- not only in making the artwork as a duo, but also in the activation of its meaning via public engagement and museum archives. 

Image credit: David Allen Burns and Austin Young / Fallen Fruit, Event Horizon: recontextualized on 52 panels of glass, custom made a synchronous repeat pattern, archival inks printed onto acrylic substrate, commissioned by META / FACEBOOK as a permanent intervention on architecture by Frank Ghery, 2021.

The visitor of an immersive artwork and their emotional response becomes a part of the artwork. The site also becomes an activated space. We focus on joy and delight and a seek to invoke the sense of the sublime. We get excited about the process of ‘discovery’ in two ways; as part of the research process and also in the maximal carefully considered installation design. We want all types of people to have an opportunity to identify with the artwork and have a sense of familiarity and understanding about their city, histories, and culture.’ And also give them a way to read deeper into the work if they choose. 

Image credit: David Allen Burns and Austin Young / Fallen Fruit, documentation image with custom refitted vintage sofa,  “Teatro del Sole / Theater of the Sun,”  asynchronous repeat pattern, archival watercolor inks printed on organic fabric, dimensions variable, commissioned by Manifesta 12, Palermo, Siciily, Italy, 2018.

For much of your work, you are actually in collaboration with local governments as well as institutions and museums. What are some of the rewards and challenges while working with government bodies to create art works?

It is an honor. The best part is always the connections we make with people and the idea that we leave something in a neighborhood that could bear fruit for another 100 years. We feel fortunate to be making artwork. We have been awarded almost 20 permanent works of art in public parks and public rights of way that use fruit bearing trees and shrubs as part of the materials  - in New York City, New Orleans, Madrid, Los Angeles, San Diego, and in 2022 upcoming at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno and more.

All projects have a process and a timeline. “Challenges” and “rewards” we feel are better addressed as “process.” The more people involved and the larger the scale, more agencies are involved for review. 

Image credit: David Allen Burns and Austin Young / Fallen Fruit, “Monument to Sharing,” 32 orange trees and 32 line poem created collaboratively with the public, Los Angeles State Historic park, dimensions variable, a Creative Capital Foundation supported project, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2017.

We consider sidewalks in a city and hallways in museums as equitable public spaces. They are the pathways that we travel from place A to place B and they are typically overlooked as places that have meanings. Like the unexpected occasionally epiphenal magic moment -- when the experience of the world resets itself. Seeing a rainbow, running into a friend, remembering something meaningful, noticing something new, etc. We love that place and moment most of all.

Image credit: David Allen Burns and Austin Young / Fallen Fruit,  “Promised Land,”  asynchronous repeat pattern, archival watercolor inks printed on organic fabric, dimensions variable, commissioned by Tel Aviv University Art Museum for the exhibition PLANET, Tel Aviv, Israel, 2019.

Image credit: David Allen Burns and Austin Young / Fallen Fruit,  “Historic Victorville Public Fruit Park,” created with the residents of historic Victorville, in partnership with R.O.O.T., San Bernardino Arts Connection, and the City of Victorville, 2018.

What an important message it is to make magic moments at every corner! What is your advice for artists looking to make an impact beyond traditional artist paths?

At the beginning, people were always trying to define our work as social activism, urban gardening, or a food project. We held our ground and kept presenting and describing the projects as artworks. We are artists making contemporary artwork. If you are starting out, say yes to everything and get into every group exhibition in your category; exhibitions about environment, photography, whatever. Another thing we regularly did was to take opportunities to curate projects inviting other visual artists, performance based artists, and experimental writers to participate with both existing and newly created works.  But in the end, you find your own way. There is no magic formula for making it right. We have exhibited in hundreds of group exhibitions and dozens of solo projects at all levels-- local, regional, national, and international. We are actively  learning from our research and try to continually push our  relationship to materials. We do not actively look for bigger, better, venues -- we are interested in making “good work.”  

And this good work has a very distinct style! You have mentioned both surrealism and pop imagery as inspiration for this style. What influences are you responding to in your visual elements?

We are always responding to the present moment - and growing as artists. Considering that we have been making work for 17 + years together - we make video art, photography, fruit parks, we do several participatory projects - some of which have become successful - including Lemonade Stand (our self portrait project) and Fallen Fruit Magazine - (our public magazine collage project) We are always thinking about new things and coming up with new ideas for artworks. It’s a journey. People have fallen in love with our immersive art installations and they have gotten more detailed and complex and better over time. 

Pop art and Surrealism have influenced us as artists. We use media like abstraction or collage to relate ideas about the natural world in contemporary moments and in the abstract concepts related to memory and history. Since narrative is subjective, everyone's individual truth makes each person's reaction to the work "right" and we seek to create this common ground for sharing and community.

Image credit: David Allen Burns and Austin Young / Fallen Fruit,  “Fruits from the Garden and the Field (Purple and Yellow),”  commissioned by V&A Museum for the exhibition FOOD: Bigger than the Plate, London, England, 2019.

Collaboration seems to be a really important part of your process. Can you describe your concept of “decentralized collaboration”?

We believe that collaboration is an essential part of culture. In this way, we find that it is essential in contemporary art. Even visiting a museum is a collaboration. Walking in a neighborhood is a collaboration. Sharing an understanding is a collaboration. We, as a people, continually collaborate in passive and intentional ways everyday. We all can’t help it. It’s automatic and an integrated part of everyday life. This is how we as artists explore the depths and capacities for questioning and expand how authorship is created / co-created. 

We, as a people, continually collaborate in passive and intentional ways everyday.

A lot of our research is based on observations. Watching people in spaces; walking sidewalks, hanging out in parks, exploring libraries and museums. We listen. And then we listen more carefully to the sounds behind the words, the traffic, the animals, the machines. We listen to the spaces between the words. We watch this way also, looking for the meaning in all of the spaces we are investigating. These spaces are opportunities for unactivated collaborations.

It goes back to the message from Leviticus -- In this case, our interpretation is to leave the harvest of the margins of meanings for the stranger or the passerby. To create beautiful artwork installations for people in the future. To protect the possibilities of learning about something that you may think you already know; to shift canonized meanings and shift understanding to open-ended possibilities found in the future - People may understand these ideas (artworks) differently than we do today over time.

Thank you so much David Burns and Austin Young of Fallen Fruit for such an insightful interview! 

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

December 27, 2021

This week we recognize the work of artist  Kristin Jones.

"As an artist I see potential in all things. I am compelled to create contemplative, ephemeral work aimed at magnifying our awareness of place and present. Through my work, I attempt to render the invisible visible, and to awaken a sense of wonder on both a grand and intimate scale. Collaboration is central to my practice, prompting a direct dialogue with the site, history, the context, elements, and creative partners. Above all, I am fascinated by the absolute impermanence of the world to which we belong: the fluidity of light, natural phenomena, and the continuum of time."

Four Seasons of Still Lives is a photographic body of work that explores the unseeable through medical imaging techniques. Featuring seasonal produce, flora, and other collected materials, the unlikely process of tomography makes the invisible visible. In most cases, these once familiar objects are abstracted beyond immediate recognition, resulting in a delicate, ghostly, and volumetric series of black and white images. Among the subjects pictured are a head of lettuce, a pompelmo, a durian, a pomegranate, a sweet potato, and the contents of a blue bird’s nest. Developed over the course of an ongoing residency hosted by Dr. Barry Berson at the New York Medical Imaging Lab, this series is a collaboration with radiology technician Elizabeth MacFarlane.

The Suminagashi works are a series of experiments made by floating ink on the surface of water. This ongoing exploration of the physics of intangible fluid media has it’s origins in a fascination with the passage of time, an attempt to record an instant before it passes and dissipates, never to occur again.

In choreographing elements such as the chemistry of different fluids and paper, the moisture in the environment and the movement of air, attempts to understand and control the media are challenging. The subtle movements in the liquid’s surface are thrillingly unpredictable, though anticipated. Time and again, it is a respect for, and collaboration with the materials and their interaction with natural phenomena that yield the most dynamic work.”

Ineffable was a delicate, temporary installation made from an assemblage of hardly perceptible white threads, radiating from the top of a tall tree, fanning out over the stone amphitheater within the mossy woods below. The rays of this tent-like structure, when viewed from a distance coalesced into a distinct geometric form equaling far more than the sum of its’ parts.

The piece was intended to sharpen our awareness of place and to augment our emotional relationship with light and the environment. The work was inspired by the exquisite amphitheater set into the wooded landscape, looking 270 degrees West at Mount Monadnock. The installation, made specifically for Medal Day at the MacDowell Colony during a 2014 residency there, was presented with Ora, di Terra, an atmospheric composition by Walter Branchi.

Kristin Jones maintains both studio and public practices, working collaboratively across disciplines to create site-specific, time-based projects that frame natural phenomena against the built environment. With a deep commitment to public projects and the belief that art is a powerful vehicle for urban renewal and environmental awareness, Jones has spent her career creating large-scale collaborative works for the public domain. Her installations, works on and paper and time-lapse photography have been exhibited internationally. Jones holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. She is the winner of three Fulbright Fellowships and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. She is currently based in New York City. kristinandreajones.com

Featured Images: ©Kristin Jones, Four Seasons of Still Lives, 2018, archival prints on paper, 5" x 8.5"; Suminagashi, 2010-2017, sumi ink on Japanese paper, 10" diameter; Ineffable, 2014, elastic thread and hardware, 120' x 80'

The environmental activist and artist Kim Abeles at the Park to Playa trail in Los Angeles, where her seed sculptures are installed.Credit...Joyce Kim for The New York Times

Kim Abeles Turns the Climate Crisis Into Eco-art

She doesn’t just make art about pollution, she makes art out of it. Now her “Smog Collectors” series is on view at California State University, Fullerton.

By Jori Finkel

Dec. 9, 2021

CULVER CITY — When Kim Abeles had a studio in downtown Los Angeles in the mid 1980s, she was thrilled one day to see a deep bluish wedge appear between two buildings: a sliver of the San Gabriel Mountains, which had for months been obscured by the city’s notoriously thick smog.

Abeles, a conceptual artist by training with roots in nature — she once lived in a grain silo in Ohio — turned her amazement into a project governed by rules of her own making. She set out to photograph that space from her studio fire escape every day until the mountain appeared clearly again. It took a full year and three weeks.

She soon found other ways to approach the wedge. She decided to walk from her studio on Sept. 10, 1987, toward the mountain “as the crow flies,” she said, until she could actually see it. She had to scale barbed wire fences and cross freeways for what proved to be a strenuous 10-hour, 16.5-mile pilgrimage.

“Smog Collector (One Month of Smog)” from 1987, in which the artist gathered smog particulate matter on acrylic. Credit: Kim Abeles

She also experimented that year with a medium that ended up feeding some of her most important work over the last three decades. She cut an image of the mountain wedge into a vinyl sheet covering a plexiglass plate and set it on the fire escape for a month to gather particulate matter. In effect the smog “drew” the image, creating both a record of the pollution — she has called herself “a stenographer of the skyline” — and something meaningful, or even beautiful, from it.

“How do you represent something like the smog, which always looks like it’s in someone else’s neighborhood — how do you show something so elusive and hard to put your finger on?” Abeles, who is 69, said from a clearing near the top of the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook in Culver City. With a grand view of Los Angeles stretching out before her, she sat on a bench next to her 10,000 pound sculpture of a manzanita seed, from her series titled “Citizen Seeds.” The series was made for the local trail system through a Los Angeles County arts commission and incorporates the handiwork of community members. It was an unnaturally hot day in November, and she pointed to a faint line of pollution in the distance.

“Citizen Seeds (Ode to the Manzanita)” is one of six mixed media sculptures by Kim Abeles that are placed along the Park to Playa Trail.Credit...Joyce Kim for The New York Times

“It’s the same issue with the climate crisis more broadly,” she said. “We need to identify the problem before we can begin to see our collective or individual roles in solving it.”

Her attempts at making the invisible visible, or the abstract tangible, can now be seen in “Kim Abeles: Smog Collectors, 1987-2020” at California State University, Fullerton, the fullest presentation of her smog series to date. The art historian Karen Moss, while pointing out that Abeles has also done major work on AIDS/H.I.V. and domestic violence, said that she has been immersed in environmental issues for 30-plus years — “before other artists jumped in to do what we now call eco-art.”

The Fullerton show includes little-known smog drawings on paper, fabric, wood, glass and recycled plexiglass, starting with that original mountain wedge, as well as her most famous series, commemorative plates of American presidents she made in 1992 by exposing each portrait to the weather for four to 40 days — her way of grading each president’s environmental record.

Presidential commemorative smog plates include “James Carter in 8 Days of Smog” and “Ronald Reagan in 40 Days of Smog.” The plates were placed on a rooftop exposed to the weather for a number of days, reflecting the environmental record of each president; 1992.Credit...Ken Marchionno

The contrast between Jimmy Carter, whose visage appears faint on the porcelain plate (left outside for 8 days), and Ronald Reagan, whose face is dark and smeared with particulate matter (40 days), is especially striking. As she noted, “Carter put solar panels on the White House and Reagan took them down.”

While she’s better known for public art and community workshops than playing to the international art crowd, Abeles was featured in a 2019 show on the politics of environmental disasters at Moscow’s Garage Museum. She set out to make a new set of commemorative plates, this time featuring global leaders from Emmanuel Macron to Vladimir Putin. But a Russian maintenance worker who was spooked by Putin’s dirty plate wiped it clean of all environmental wrongdoing.

Abeles remade it for the Moscow show, and it now appears in her California survey alongside other commemorative plates.

Continue reading on the NYT's website HERE

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

December 20, 2021

This week we recognize the work of artist Susan Leibovitz Steinman.

“Working with diverse groups of local stakeholders, I conceive of, design and collectively create conceptual gardens that meld art, ecology and community action. I’ve been doing environmentally-based artwork since 1989-90, when there were few models for this particular work and little to no interest in “urban food as art.”

“EOE (Equal Opportunity Eating) projects are living sculptural installations manifested as organic collaborative gardens. They model how to grow healthy food with little money and less land - critical survival skills for ecologically and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Counterintuitive to art world propriety, my EOE projects are most successful when disseminated, copied, adapted or emulate. Streetfront or in schoolyards, EOE works provide more than healthy food: they are a meeting place, an oasis and a point source for initiating economic organizing and revitalization for the larger community.”

Sweet Survival, a site-specific work, honors a prominent Sonoma County crop that has succeeded over millennia, largely due to sweetness. On the Museum grounds, five commercially-grafted apple trees, mulched with pink quartz, are surrounded by nitrogen fixing wintergreens over winter, and planted in a pentagon-shaped raised bed constructed of five salvaged 11-foot-long French doors. The design refers to every apple’s interior five-pointed star, its five seed chambers, with five+ genetically diverse seeds. The exterior landscape mimicked a native Sonoma grass fieldstone meadow.

Sweet Survival is a demonstration for educating passersby and Museum visitors about the genetically diverse seeds that one tree can grow. Steinman invited the public to collect seeds at Museum tasting events. Students from Santa Rosa Jr. College propagated saplings from the collected seeds at the school’s nearby learning farm. The wild saplings were then added to the Museum orchard the following spring. All trees were donated locally upon dismantling, spreading biodiverse apple trees throughout Sonoma County.

Susan Leibovitz Steinman creates large scale public installations with multiple stakeholder participation to address ecological, social and economic concerns and community-voiced needs. Based in California, she is an “itinerant social sculptor” who travels globally to create street front, temporal, improvisational, performative artworks. Her EOE Projects (equal opportunity eating) model low cost green techniques and social strategies on public land for public use, food rights, natural asset protection, bioremediation, ecological revitalization and tourism for clean local survival. Steinman received her MFA with High Distinction in Sculpture from the California College of Art, Oakland/San Francisco. steinmanstudio.com

Featured Images: ©Susan Leibovitz Steinman, Sweet Survival, 2006-2009.

Delicate Rainbow, 2021, 24”x30”, oil on canvas, photo courtesy of the artist 

December 13, 2021 by Art Spiel

Claire McConaughy: Nearby at 490 Atlantic Gallery

Featured Artist

In her solo show at 490 Atlantic Gallery, New York based painter Claire McConaughy features landscapes depicted in vivid colors and expressive linear marks. In Delicate Rainbow for instance, the painting plays on tension between horizontal, vertical, and diagonal orientations – an unexpected pale pink flow becomes a backdrop horizon to green vegetation spreading its limb-like branches diagonally upwards; on the top, blue-purple brush strokes depicting sky or water, lead the eye sideways, and then right above, a surprising orange linear brush stroke with the other rainbow colors hinted, stretch across the middle top.

Can you tell me about the paintings in your show and what would you like to share about your process?

The paintings in Nearby derive from visual experiences that are transformed though painting. They are not depictions of actual places even though my personal relationship to landscape is very deep having grown up in the Appalachians with abundant woods, lakes, and streams. I don’t exclusively work with landscape but have found a wellspring of information there and nature inspires me on many levels. The history of landscape in art, literature, and film, can make a contemporary interpretation seem daunting, but in these works I use landscape as a catalyst for the painting. The color, line, space, mystery, discovery, nuance, and drama that are all inherent in nature are also present in painting.

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