MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

June 20, 2022

This week we recognize the work of artist  Fern Shaffer.

"My interest in science has always directed me to information about the environment. By recognizing how everything is interconnected, our society can avoid mistakes that will only come back to haunt us. It makes no sense to poison the water when we will ultimately be the ones to consume it. The pattern is repeated over and over again revealing the crisis potential of our culture’s desire for immediate gratification. Living in an increasingly dangerous, toxic, and stagnant environment, for both animal and plant life, led me to investigate the dilemma through my art."

Ginkgo is a genus of highly unusual non-flowering plants. The genus first appeared in the Permian, 250 million years ago, possibly derived from “seed ferns” of the order Peltaspermales, thus the Ginkgo is a living fossil. A single tree can live as long as 1,000 years and grow to 120 feet.  The Ginkgo is a tough and hardy tree, they can live in most climates therefore they have been planted and cultivated all over the world. For thousands of years, leaves from the Ginkgo Biloba tree have been a common treatment in Chinese medicine.

"As an artist, this tree represents the plant kingdom, and I paint the leaves as a way to show respect and pay tribute to its strength and endurance. If humans became extinct, life on the planet would survive, but if there were no plants, humans would perish. Our existence depends on these species."

The "Morphogenic Fields" series from 1983 (above), its title referencing the aura of radiation that emanates from living beings, features the female form, rendered in soul-baring, tenuous outline. Shaffer uses a shifting figure/ground relationship calling to mind the flow of energy in, out and through us, depicting women enveloped within fields of gestural DNA-like marks or packed with radiating color strokes like bursts of energy set against darker voids. Evoking both the personal and universal, these works address women's identity on the threshold of exploring, and perhaps realizing, the possibilities for fulfillment opened up by feminism.

In 1980, inspired by her interest in Edgar Cayce, Mircea Eliade and Michael Harner, and prompted by ecological concerns shared with her collaborator Othello Anderson, Shaffer began enacting self-designed shamanistic rituals as a form of spiritual intervention. Anderson documented the rituals in sequential photographs that were later exhibited with elements (ceremonial garments and objects) from the performances. Feminist art critic Gloria Feman Orenstein situated Shaffer's work as part of an emerging Ecofeminism movement, describing the rituals as introducing "feminist matristic resonances" intended to create connections and restoration in the sites and communities within which they are enacted. According to writer and critic Suzi Gablik, Shaffer's "process of creating a shamanic outfit to wear can be likened to creating a cocoon, or alchemical vessel, a contained place within which magical transformations can take place." Art critic Thomas McEvilley related the garments to "an earth mother or fertility-goddess motif," evoking "non-Western or non-Modern identities" in the service of ecological concern. The artists describe the rituals in terms of "energy and thought centered on the equal balance and harmony between Nature, science, and spirit," connecting with the Earth as a living entity whose energy can be reached and unblocked through ritual, prayer and touch, much like acupuncture works on the human body.

Fern Shaffer  is an American painter, performance artist, lecturer and environmental advocate. Her work arose in conjunction with an emerging Ecofeminism movement that brought together environmentalism, feminist values and spirituality to address shared concern for the Earth and all forms of life. She first gained widespread recognition for a four-part, shamanistic performance cycle, created in collaboration with photographer Othello Anderson in 1985 title Rituals. Writer and critic Suzi Gablik praised their work for its rejection of the technocratic, rationalizing mindset of modernity, in favor of communion with magic, the mysterious and primordial, and the sous. Gablik featured Shaffer's Winter Solstice, 1985 (below), as the cover art for her influential book, The Reenchantment of Art, and wrote that the ritual opened "a lost sense of oneness with nature and an acute awareness of ecosystem" that offered "a possible basis for reharmonizing our out-of-balance relationship with nature. Shaffer is a long-time activist for women in the art through her involvement and leadership at the Chicago alternative art space Artemisia Gallery (1982-1992) and work with the national Women's Caucus for Art.     www.fernshaffer.com

Featured Images: Above, ©Fern Shaffer, The Swamp, 2007, of the Cache River Swamp, Southern, Illinois, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 180 inches; Ginkgo Leaves, Building a Tree (ongoing), oil and acrylic on canvas, 8 x 10 inches each; Morphogenic Fields (series), 1983, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 inches; Fifth Ritual, May 9, 1999, Death Valley, California; Life, Ontology at 36, 1981,canvas, acrylic, raffia, 108 x 100 inches; below, Winter Solstice, 1985, ritual performance, Lake Michigan.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

June 13, 2022

This week we recognize the work of artist  Mierle Laderman Ukeles.

In 1969, Ukeles wrote Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969! Proposal for an exhibition, "CARE," a manifesto in which she examined her position as an artist and mother. She sought to challenge the domestic role of women by reframing herself as a "maintenance artist," including household activities that keep things going, such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. The manifesto also addressed "general" or public maintenance (cleaning a building, or a street) and earth maintenance, such as addressing polluted waters. Her exhibitions and performances were and are intended to bring awareness to the low social status of maintenance work.

Since 1977, when Ukeles became the official, unsalaried Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, she has created art that deals with the endless maintenance and service work that “keeps the city alive,” urban waste flows, recycling, ecology, urban sustainability and our power to transform degraded land and water into healthy inhabitable public places.

Ukeles asks whether we can design modes of survival -- for a thriving planet, not an entropic one – that don’t crush our personal and civic freedom and silence the individual’s voice.

Touch Sanitation is one of Ukeles’ most ambitious early projects and a milestone in the history of performance art. Taking almost a year, Ukeles met over 8500 employees of the New York Sanitation Department, shaking hands with each of them and saying, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” She documented her activities on a map, meticulously recording her conversations with the workers. Ukeles documented the workers' private stories in an attempt to change some of the negative words used in the public sphere of society, using her art as an agent of change to challenge conventional stereotypes.

This 20 cubic-yard garbage truck (above) faced with hand-tempered mirror is The Social Mirror, which was included in Ukeles' retrospective at the Queens Museum in 2016-2017. It first debuted at the grand finale of the NYC Art Parade in 1983, and later was exhibited at the 2007 Armory Show. According to Ukeles, “This project allowed citizens to see themselves linked with the handlers of their waste.”

Ceremonial Arch (below), also included in Ukeles' retrospective, was comprised of 5,000 used, signed work gloves from workers at New York’s Fire, Police, Sanitation, Environmental Protection, Parks, Cultural Affairs and Transportation Departments, as well as the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The arch was topped with a canopy of tools used by ConEd workers, placed over six sturdy columns. Ukeles stated, “I put the gloves at the entrance as if to bless everyone for the sacrifice of their lives.”

Mierle Laderman Ukeles     is a feminist artist known for her service-oriented artworks, which relate the idea of process in conceptual art to domestic and civic "maintenance." She has been the official, unsalaried artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation since 1977 (HON 2019). Among her key works not mentioned above include Snow Workers’ Ballet, Echigo Tsumari; Unburning Freedom Hall; and LANDING at Freshkills Park (in process). She has exhibited internationally including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Istanbul Biennial, Manifesta 10, among many other important venues and is the permanent collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Art Institute of Chicago (promised gift), and the Jewish Museum, New York, and many other important art institutions. Ukeles received a B.A. in international relations from Barnard College in 1961 and an M.A. in interrelated arts from New York University in 1973.  She is currently based in New York and Israel.  feldmangallery.com/artist-home/mierle-laderman-ukeles.com

Featured Images: Above, ©Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance — Outside and Inside, July 22, 1973, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Artist-in-Residence, New York City Department of Sanitation since 1977; Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-80, New York City; The Social Mirror, 4th iteration since 1983 at Queens Museum, 2016-2017; Ceremonial Arch Honoring Service Workers IV, 1988-2016 including 5000 gloves of maintenance workers at retrospective, Queens Museum, 2016-2017; below, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Dusting a Baffle, from Private Performances of Personal Maintenance as Art, 1970, Photograph Jack Ukeles.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

June 6, 2022

This week we recognize the work of artist Lenore Malen.

Malen is a New York based interdisciplinary artist, who in 1999 invented The New Society for Universal Harmony, a fictional re-creation of an l8th century utopian society. Since she has used the lens of history and humor to explore utopian longings, dystopic aftermaths, and the sciences and technologies that inform them. She works with diverse media in all her projects incorporating live performance, photography, film/video, multi-screen projection, installation and fiction writing.

Filmed in Genoa and Bogliasco in May 2019 during a residency at The Bogliasco Foundation, Circe (above) was produced, written and directed by Lenore Malen. The Story, adapted from Homer’s Odyssey, Book 10, Circe, a Greek mythological figure, a sorceress, daughter of the Oceanid Nymph Perse and the God Helios, uses herbs and potions to poison the men around her. Preferring the company of animals to human males she transforms these same men into pigs.

In this film and installation Circe’s tale is woven into a dérive, an unplanned journey through the city of Genoa and into the mountains. On the journey Circe is accompanied by three men she befriends at the Aquarium of Genoa while lurking around large tanks of aquatic animals. The entourage reads aloud while they walk, at first from a screenplay by Gary Indiana on dislocation, lost objects, unfamiliar places. Eventually they turn to Book 10 that they read and re-read, rehearsing for a play while moving through the city.

Circe is a document of a live performance, a comedy and improbable spectacle on the streets of Genoa. It is also a myth in narrative form.

"From 2012-15, I was working with actors and a stage director hoping to bring to life an image from a 15th century manuscript illumination that we could use as a springboard for an investigation into human ecological destruction and our endlessly cruel treatment of non human animals. Many workshops led to video documentation that inspired the making of short films and eventually developed into Scenes From Paradise."

Scenes From Paradise (above) is a dark comedy presented in multiple formats: a film, live performances, and three-channel video installations, which are variously titled Reversal, The Reason of the Strongest is Always the Best, So we’ll no more go a rowing by the light of the moon and Scenes From Paradise. In every format Eden, the cautionary tale, is made newly relevant by the ticking clock of climate change, habitat loss and extinction. But we do not live in a human centered world; we only imagine that we do.

A fairy tale in an anxious time, the final chapter of Scenes from Paradise, Eve in Sheepland (above) is a dark comedy in 9 short scenes (17 minutes). It was filmed as a live, unscripted performance on a sheep farm in Ghent, New York. The two characters Eve and Adam, time travelers, find themselves on the farm. Naked and unashamed, befuddled and doomed they interact with the sheep, they learn to be human and they die. Together the scenes reveal the sheep’s bodily sense of vulnerability (and panic) as well as their profound knowledge of earth and death that we humans find too much to bear.

I Am The Animal (below) explores apiculture and the writings of Jacques Derrida brought together in three-channel video installations and a documentary film on beekeepers in the Hudson Valley Region. The title of the project is an homage to Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, l998, which is a philosophical investigation into the way we have anthropomorphized animals and a plea against the industrialized treatment of them. In the films interview with beekeepers are intercut with historical and found footage.

Lenore Malen published her eponymously titled book The New Society For Universal Harmony in 2005 (Granary Books). She has exhibited and performed since 2004 on the BBC (Lion TV), at Apex Art, Participant Inc., Location One, The Slought Foundation. In 2010-2012 she performed at Wave Hill, Tufts University and the Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Poland. And, in 2019 at the Uppsala Konstmusem, Sweden. In Spring 2020, Malen was awarded a grant by the Finnish Cultural Institutes for a project (co-produced with Samir Bhowmik) titled “Where from Here” on the subject of virtuality in a pandemic.

Malen received a BA in Art History from Skidmore College, an MA in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania and later studied at the School of Visual Arts with the artist Will Insley while he was working on “OneCity,” a Non Utopian Monumental City. She was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and NYFA and NYSCA awards in Interdisciplinary Art. She teaches in the Art/Media/Technology Program at Parsons/The New School, New York. lenoremalen.com

Featured Images: Above, ©Lenore Malen, Circe (2020) filmed in Genoa, Italy during a residency at The Bogliasco Foundation; Circe (2020) on Vimeo (25 mins); Scenes from Paradise (2013-2017) performed live at Art Omi International Art Centerin 2016; Eve in Sheepland, 2018, installation at Uppsala Konstmuseum, Sweden, 2019; I Am Animal, 2007-2010, featured at CR10 in 2015, Livingston, New York, curated by Amy Lipton ; below, Lenore Malen at The Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa, Italy, 2019.

The ecoartspace June 2022 e-Newsletter is here

(Bleached, 2022. Crochet, assemblage. Acrylic, wool, bamboo yarns; plastic medical waste (needle caps, needle sheaths, vial caps, tubing caps, oxygen tubing, nasal prong tubing), polystyrene, pins. 36” x 40” x 6”)

Member Interview
By Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein

Ruth Tabancay is redefining the meaning of renaissance artistry as both a scientist and a textile artist dedicated to environmental awareness work. Using objects that largely exist in excess in her life (used tea bags, plastic medical waste, Styrofoam) she seamlessly blends traditions in textiles while heightening topics in microbiology. From plastic eating micro-organisms to tender memories and ocean impacts, Ruth’s work is multi-facetted and intriguing. The works Bleached, Adapting to New Substrates 2.1, and Adapting to New Substrates 3.0 will be part of the group exhibition A World Free of Plastic Imagined at Ruth's Table, 3160 21st Street, San Francisco, June 9-August 26, 2022. Reception Thursday, June 9, 6-8 pm. www.ruthstable.org

What’s In You and On You Normal Flora and Pathogens 1.2, 2019, Hand embroidery, fabric, embroidery floss, glass Petri dishes, 1 x 28 x 20 inches

Ruth, you create this amazing combination of textile traditions with contemporary issues, materials and sciences. What led you to work in textiles and how have your material and technique decisions informed your work?

As a teenager, I taught myself a variety of textile techniques—machine sewing, embroidery, crochet, knitting, needlepoint— and when I attended California College of the Arts I added weaving, felting, printing, basketry, and others to my collection of methods. I’m comfortable working with fiber materials as I’ve worked with them most of my life. I’m drawn to the tactility of unworked linear fiber materials such as yarn and wire and to objects such as tea bags, needle caps, or plastic bags that carry an intrinsic message. Thinking of their provenance or their future gives me a place to start an idea. When I latch onto a concept, I try to think of a way to impart the idea with materials rather than an exact representation of it. I draw on my inventory of techniques to see what most conveys that meaning.

Adapting to New Substrates 2.1, 2021, Hand embroidery on various plastics, 32 x 42 x 2 inches

And that inventory is vast! In your embroidery work, you integrate your interest in microbiology to display various bacteria that are usually unseen. In “New Substrates” you are displaying bacterial strains on plastics. How are you using your knowledge of microbiology to infer this evolution toward plastic dissolution? How much is science and how much is fantasy?

I majored in bacteriology in college and worked in hospital laboratories before going to medical school, so I’ve spent years looking at micro-organisms and learning their diseases. These microscopic forms and arrangements are embedded in my subconscious. In 2015, I started embroidering stitches that resembled micro-organisms as seen through a microscope onto fabric. In my embroidered series set in Petri dishes, What’s In You and On You: Normal Flora and Pathogens, I refer to the colors of stains, agar media, diagnostic tests and light fields that are actually used in the lab to inform my embroidery floss and fabric colors.  I first began embroidering on polystyrene meat trays (commonly referred to as Styrofoam) in 2017 after reading that the gut bacteria of waxworms could digest polystyrene. More research along these lines is taking place in laboratories around the world. Since micro-organisms need substrate to grow on, such as different types of agar media in the lab, I extrapolated that polystyrene, or any kind of plastic could be possible. Though practical use of this research seemed far away, in April 2022 it was reported in Nature that researchers have found an enzyme variant that can break down plastic in hours to days rather than years. This finding gets us closer to actual usage. For my Adapting to New Substrates series, since the premise of organisms digesting plastic on the global scale is not yet a feasible reality, I embroider actual fungal structures such as branching septate hyphae or mycelia as well as larvae, bacteria, fungal spores and colonies. In my fantasy, the organisms could take on the color of the plastic they are living on or a completely new one.

Devour III, 2017, Hand embroidery, foam meat tray, embroidery floss, 5 3/4 x 8 1/4 x 1 inches

I am glad you mentioned the Styrofoam since your work extends beyond traditional fiber materials and into sugars, tea bags and plastics. Yet, when you use these materials, you hold true to practices in quilting or molecular structures. How do you balance tradition, reality, fantasy and avant-garde?

I can trace many of my works back to traditional craft—hand embroidery, hand quilting, crochet, the geometry of traditional patterns, fabric manipulation—but I apply modern concepts and personal experience to my work to add intent. Even my work with the scanning electron microscope and computerized Jacquard loom refers to traditional weave structures, both in the fabrics I scan and how I weave them. Concept is foremost and executing it in a fiber technique is my challenge to creating my artwork. Tradition, reality, and fantasy blend seamlessly together. The work with which I’m most satisfied contains very personal references. My tea bag bed quilt speaks of the times spent with my daughter snuggled in comforters, drinking tea, and doing her geometry homework. The accumulation of tea bags on the windowsill lead to Extending the Useful Life. My piece, Bleached, about the bleaching of the coral reefs, is composed of hyperbolic crochet, a structure seen in corals, sea slugs, lettuces, and cacti, and plastic medical waste. I was diagnosed with a progressive lung disease 10 years ago and 3 years ago, my lung function deteriorated to the point that I needed, and was fortunate to receive, a lung transplant. I have been collecting plastic medical waste for years knowing it would end up in my artwork. I created fantasy coral reef organisms out of vial caps, needle caps, needle sheaths, oxygen tubing, and tubing caps. This work creates personal conflict because I know one of the main causes of coral bleaching is the rise in ocean temperature. The burning of fossil fuels and, in my case, the manufacture of plastic medical waste contribute to this. But I have depended on medications delivered via these plastic objects to keep me alive. It distresses me to know that my personal needs add to this problem. 

Extending the Useful Life, 2010. Hand stitched, tea bags, embroidery floss, muslin, batting, 26 x 33 x 65 inches

Thank you so much for a wonderful interview, Ruth!

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

May 30, 2022

This week we recognize the work of artist    Dominique Mazeaud.

"The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande (above) was a seven-year performance I began in 1987, my heart calling to speak and act through the intention/attention-filled gestures of ritual. Once a month, I walked the river’s bed and banks doing a literal and symbolic cleansing. The deep-listening portion being as important as the collection of found objects. A journal, “riveries,” chronicled my song as an Earth heartist."

"Thirty years ago a funny little word flew in on the wings of a western wind and burst forth from the river water I scooped up in my hands: the name heartist."

"For many years, I used Marina Abramovic’s quote as a preamble to my biography: “Art, it’s not about doing, it’s about being.” Years later, I met Ulay, Marina's former partner, in Japan while working on re-enlivening a deserted island. Correcting his ex, he said, “Art, it’s not about doing, it’s about becoming.” Doing art is partly becoming one’s definition of art. For me, it comes to the word heartist. I have written about heartist, but today I prefer to let it speak for itself."

"The children, our children, are very much aware of what is happening to the world. In this outdoor installation (above) in 2014 at the Leonora Curtin Wetland Preserve in Santa Fe, marking the 50th anniversary of the signing of The Wilderness Act, they decide not to wait for us and go on a Pilgrimage to the Wild."

The heartist's Secret (above): "Dominique takes us on a journey through her life and practice that offers many rewards to those whose hearts have been broken open by the uncertainty of this time and other previous traumas. She translates wisdom that come from different culture perspectives with deep respect and filters her process through the lenses of dream work and intuition." Beverly Naidus

"As I began recovering from a major hiking accident in 2010, I was called to do art that would encompass my present circumstance and continue to be inspired by Nature’s prompts. One Thousand Arms of Compassion (below) is an installation bringing to light the visible relationship between letterforms and Nature. It consists of a thousand forked branches looking like Ys, installed in concentric circles in the tradition of the mandala."

Dominique Mazeaud                 is an artist whose ritual performances and installations are considered prayers. Her passion is the Earth, and her identity belongs to Spirit. The word heartist reflects the gift of listening to Nature. The term results from Mazeaud's quest for "the spiritual in art in our time," which she has sought to answer since 1979. Heartist is a word unifying life and art and suggests a way of being in these transformation times. Dominique Mazeaud was born in France and has lived in the United States since 1967. In 1987 she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she resides today. Mazeaud organized the traveling exhibition Revered Earth for the Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, 1990.    earthheartist.net

Featured Images, top to bottom: ©Dominique Mazeaud, The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande, 1987-1994; 173 Heart Rocks Plus One Broken Heart, 1995, installation at CCA, Santa Fe; Pilgrimage to the Wild, 2014, installation for Wilderness Acts outdoor exhibition, Axle Contemporary, Santa Fe, New Mexico; The heartist's Secret, 2021, a memoirby Dominique Mazeaud; One Thousand Arms of Compassion, 2010,Y-shaped twigs, 9 x 9 feet. Photograph from Alan Eckert.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

May 23, 2022

This week we recognize the work of artists   Reiko Goto and Tim Collins.

Goto and Collins embrace an ecosystems methodology, collaborating with a range of disciplines, communities and other living things. They are interested in the ways that art and imagination contribute to practical wisdom and democratic discourse about ethics and human values. The work primarily focuses upon natural public places and everyday experience of environmental commons. An ethical-aesthetic impulse permeates the artwork.

Deep Mapping at Lough Boora Sculpture Park was commissioned by Offaly County Council and Bord na Móna and funded by Offaly County Council, The Arts Council and Creative Ireland. The book was published in Ireland, 2020, and documents a ‘deep mapping’ of the Park and the contexts which continue to shape its meaning. The text contributes to the goal of agreeing an exceptional and sustainable artistic vision to inform the future development of a Land and Environmental Arts facility. It also intends to provide an initial historic, cultural and ecological contribution for artists and scientists trying to orient themselves at Lough Boora in the future.

Goto and Collins worked with a team of scientists, technologists, and musicians to reveal the breath of a tree. Their intention was to explore the empathic interrelationship we may have with trees. PLEIN AIR above integrates aesthetics, ethics, and awareness in the pursuit of a better understanding of the limitations of people-plant and culture-nature relationships. The artwork provides an experiential interface to an important but generally invisible aspect of carbon sequestration. The experience produced by PLEIN AIR is metaphoric; through the mediation of sensors and software, we hear a sound of one leaf – one tree breathing. Does our sense of moral duty change as we listen? A tree is commonly understood as property, as a utilitarian resource, and as a non-sentient thing. Yet the presence of trees in our daily lives and their bio-chemical agency, their carbon dioxide / oxygen exchange, can be construed as an essential condition of the public realm.

 

Lanolin, Can you see the forest of Scotland?     below is a commentary on the relationship between landscape, trees and sheep in Scotland. The work emerged from a walk in Loch Katrine with the Native Woodlands Discussion Group, where member Ruth Anderson showed Goto the robust bonsai-tree like stem of a native birch tree and its root structure, new growth which developed once sheep were removed (and deer fenced out) of the National Park. The removal of sheep from the Scottish landscape makes an enormous impact on trees and their ability to regenerate and prosper.

Working with unwashed fleece the artist carefully carded the wool and established the background for the lighter, washed wool of the Saint Andrew’s Cross, the Saltire. The land is the context for culture, and the trees are the language of landscape that emerges once the pressure of sheep is lifted. Lanolin is another cultural decoy, conflating nationalism and past land use with future visions of an expanded forest in Scotland.

Collins & Goto Studio: Reiko Goto and Tim Collins have developed long-term, socially engaged environmental research (SEER) that examines the cultural meaning of semi-natural ancient forest: Future Forest (2013-present); Sylva Caledonia (2015); Caledonian Decoy (2017); PLEIN AIR: The Ethical Aesthetic Impulse (2010); CO2 Edinburgh (2013); Sound of a Tree: Cologne (2016); PLEIN AIR Live at Glasgow Botanics (2017); Nine Mile Run (1997-2000); and 3 Rivers 2nd Nature (2000-2005). Outputs include artworks, exhibitions, seminars, workshops, and publications that embrace an arts-led dialogue method of research-and theory-informed public practice. They have worked with other artists, musicians, planners, communities, scientists, and technologists as well as  historians and philosophers to realize work for over twenty years. collinsandgoto.com

Featured Images top to bottom: ©Collins & Goto Studio,Deep Mapping at Lough Boora Sculpture Park (2020); Deep Mapping book; Plein Air: The Breath of Trees (2019-2020); Plein Air book; Lanolin, Can you see the forest of Scotland? (2013).

Below: Tim Collins (left) and Reiko Goto (right)

Tessa Grundon, Invasive Species, 2018-2021/2022, Asiatic Bittersweet root systems and border fencing, dimensions variable.

Art Spiel

Reflections on the work of contemporary artists

Posted on May 23, 2022 by Art Spiel

Fragile Rainbow: Traversing Habitats by ecoartspace

Featured Project: with curator Sue Spaid

The group show Fragile Rainbow: Traversing Habitats at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn includes paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations addressing environmental issues by more than fifty artists from the New York City region who are members of ecoartspace. The title is based on Claire McConaughy’s oil painting, Fragile Rainbow, referencing both hope and loss. The show runs from May 7^th through June 4^th, 2022. Curator Sue Spaid elaborates on this large-scale group show.

What is your curatorial vision for this show and can you walk us briefly through the show?

As it turns out, organizing a members’ exhibition is a bit more complicated than curating a typical group exhibition. For one, I knew only a handful of the artists, though I had encountered many more during ecoartspace’s regular zoom presentations whereby four to five artists introduce their practice in the framework of trees, fungi, plastic, water, or abstraction (multi-monthly zoom sessions are typically thematic). Moreover, this exhibition came together rather rapidly as the gallery’s availability wasn’t secured until March. Ecoartspace founder Patricia Watts identified over fifty local artists who submitted up to six artworks along with installation instructions. Not only was I responsible for selecting artworks and creating meaningful relationships amidst this unusual space replete with radiators, windows and doors, but I had to track whether there was sufficient space to include artworks by as many members as possible.

Technicalities aside, once the artworks were selected, the idea to organize them in terms of habitat and interconnectedness seemed obvious. Even more wonderful was the way everything came together during installation, enabling the exhibition itself to exemplify interconnected habitat. Simulating a grove, one wall features paintings replete with trees, branches, flowers, fungi, roots, animals, and seeds, including pendulous cigar tree seeds (Catalpa speciosa). Two-sided drawings dangling from wires that span three columns fortuitously mimic marks and gestures visible in nearby artworks. As a result, notions of entanglement and sinuousness abound. Continuing the tradition of Plains Indian women’s drawing abstract geometric motifs, Indigenous artist Bebonkwe’s Post-Traumatic Entanglement: Opal proffers a sober counterpoint to this exhibition’s surfeit of exuberant renderings like Pamela Casper’s Forest Spectacle and Deborah Wasserman’s Migrating Crop.

Go to article here

Nancy Evans, Fleurs du mal (Evil Flower), 2018. Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 64 x 64 inches. © Nancy Evans. Courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. 

ArtSeen, Brooklyn Rail, May 2022

Nancy Evans: Moonshadow

By Mary Jones

The phenomenal supermoons of the past six years deeply impressed Nancy Evans, and in Moonshadow, Evans’s first show with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, they serve as a powerful motif to consider our precarious, transient place in the universe. Of her seven large, radiant paintings, five are dated from 2016, the year that the largest supermoon since 1948 rose in the politically unforgettable month of November 2016. The other two were also completed during years of significant supermoons—the Blood Moon of 2018, and the rare Blue Moon of 2020. The title, Moonshadow, refers to the song by Cat Stevens, which whimsically imagines overcoming loss and embracing the here and now. Similarly, Evans constructs her avidly symbolic landscapes with simple compositions, alluding to American Modernism and evoking transformation and awakening in times of upheaval.  

Like Agnes Pelton (1881–1961), whose retrospective title aptly labeled her as a “Desert Transcendentalist,” Evans acknowledges being inspired by the landscape of California: her formative years in the fig orchards of its fertile Central Valley, and recently, the desert of Apple Valley. She describes these experiences as encounters with the metaphysical—even hallucinatory—sublime. Also, like Pelton, Evans has studied Hinduism and Jungian symbolism and depicts lumination as a harbinger for a reality beyond the material world, perhaps a messenger for consciousness. One might refer to Evans as a “Desert Existentialist.” There’s little tranquility in these aqueous, dramatic supermoons. Instead of stasis, there’s action, even hints of foreboding. Lars von Trier's film Melancholia (2011) comes to mind, in which a beautiful bright star is soon identified as a rogue planet whose orbit will inevitably destroy Earth. As natural disasters and climate change increasingly become part of our lives, we live with—and deny—the threat of our self-imposed extinction. The moons in Evans’s paintings hover in a restless gestalt, merging natural wonder with a call to consciousness.

Continue reading here

On View

Luis De Jesus
April 16 – May 28, 2022
Los Angeles

Critics picks ARTFORUM, May 16, 2022

Los Angeles

Radical Propagations/Propagaciones Radicales

March 21 - July 30, 2022

18th Street Arts Center (Airport Campus) 3026 Airport Avenue

Guerrilla gardening, seed libraries, plant marches, and maintenance art come together in this touching and thoughtful group show on regenerative cultural gestures, curated by Mexican transdisciplinary artist Maru García in the 18th Street Arts Center’s spacious Airport Campus space.

Light floods the gallery, illuminating Peruvian artist Lucía Monge’s Plantón Móvil (Plant Walks), 2010–, an installation featuring a menagerie of potted plants on skateboards and roller skates and in wheelbarrows, led by another plant with a megaphone—the ringleader of this verdant protest. Behind these conscientious objectors is a video documenting a collection of Monge’s various Plantóns Móvil performances, which have taken place in various cities around the world over the past twelve years: demonstrations with plants being carried by humans—spilling out of arms or poking out of backpacks—to share in a moment of solidarity. Accompanying the work is a selection of gorgeous printed Plantón Móvil materials which, in part, explain why the plant-supporting dissenters walk: “ . . . plants borrow a speed noticeable by people and in return people may borrow some of their slowness . . . we move together to express our living-ness.”

To the right of this “protest” are a set of three sprouting oak seeds, suspended in bio gel in clear rectangular containers mounted on a wall, their roots clearly visible. This piece is part of Rebecca Youssef’s The Vanishing Canopy, 2022, a body of work inspired by a study from the Spatial Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, on the reduction of LA’s residential green cover. Due to mass-produced dwellings and home expansion, this cover has shrunk by as much as 55 percent between 2000 and 2009. As a gesture toward correcting this imbalance, Youssef cultivates five to six different oak varieties and plants approximately five thousand acorns each season in and around the Santa Monica Mountains. The Vanishing Canopy, and these pieces in particular, comment on the resilience and adaptability of oak trees, despite their restrictive and anthropocentric surroundings.

— Halo Rossetti

More about the exhibition here