MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
May 16, 2022
This week we recognize the work of artist duo Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison.
The Harrisons’ concept of art embraces a breathtaking range of disciplines. Their work involves proposing solutions and involves not only public discussion, but extensive mapping and documentation of these proposals in an art context.
Greenhouse Britain is an installation that addresses Global Warming from an artist’s perspective. The work proposes an alternative narrative about how people might withdraw as waters rise, what new forms of settlement might look life, and what content or properties a new landscape might have in response to the Global Warming phenomenon. It also demonstrates how a city might be defended.
The installation is composed of a 13 foot long model of the island of Britain. Six projectors above it project the rivers rising in response to storm surge and coastal waters rising in 2 meter increments, up to 16 meters. One key element in this work responds to the fact that the waters will rise gracefully, posing the questions, “How might one withdraw with equal grace?” and “How might one defend against the ocean’s rise?”
Performance, Graffiti, Billboards, and Posters. "Meditations on the Sacramento River, the Delta and the Bays at San Francisco" was commissioned by the Floating Museum of San Francisco and exhibited first at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art as part of a three-museum show that also included street posters, billboards and street graffiti. This was the first critique of the green revolution and intensive irrigated farming in art, linking the loss of bio-diversity to the green revolution and industrialized agriculture. It also advocated an early bio-regional approach to the Central Valley of California. Written about extensively, it was twice on the cover of Art Week.
The Lagoon Cycle, a 360 foot long and eight foot tall mural, is an extended semi-autobiographical dialogue, with stories and anecdotes, plays between two characters, a "Lagoon Maker" and a "witness", and serves to establish the philosophical basis for the ecological argument in many later works. Beginning in Sri Lanka with an edible crab and ending in the Pacific with the greenhouse effect, it seeks ever-larger frames for a consideration of survival. It looks at experimental science, the marketplace and megatechnology, finally posing the question, "What are the conditions necessary for survival" and concluding that it is necessary to reorient consciousness around a different database.
The Lagoon Cycle was also recreated as a complex hand-made book. The Lagoon Cycle was designed to envelop. The Book of the Lagoons was designed to be intimate and accessible.
Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, among the leading pioneers of the eco-art movement, worked as a collaborative team for almost forty years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development. Their single exhibitions or large scale installations are numerous. Internationally they have presented their work in two Venice Biennales, Two Sao Paolo Biennales, Documenta 8, the Museums of Modern Art in Chicago, San Francisco, Bonn (Germany), Aachen (Germany), Toulouse (France), Ljublijana (Slovenia), the Museum of the Revolution in Zagreb (Croatia) as well as Kasteel Groeneveld in Holland. Their work took Second Prize at the Nagoya Bienale in 1991 in Japan. They received the Groeneveld Award for Doing the Most Significant work of the year for the Dutch Landscape in Holland in 2002. Their gallery representation has been with Ronald Feldman Fine Arts from 1974 to the present. theharrisonstudio.net
Featured Images: ©Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, "The Kimpenerwaard" (2002/2013), "Greenhouse Britain" (2009), "Meditations on the Sacramento River, the Delta and the Bays at San Francisco" (1976-1977), "The Lagoon Cycle" (1974-1978)
