Decidedly Ambivalent
2009
Exhibition proposal/ statement for the exhibition, Decidedly Ambivalent, that I wrote and curated, with Anna Mogilevsky assisting in curating. Decidedly Ambivalent opened in the fall 2009 at the New Art Center, Newton, MA.
For images and press release, please visit:
Decidedly Ambivalent
Image credit: Rob Carter
For images and press release, please visit:
Decidedly Ambivalent
Image credit: Rob Carter
Decidedly Ambivalent
Decidedly Ambivalent is a group show wherein eight artists address the paradox of society’s desire to experience nature in it’s purist form, while simultaneously desiring expansion into and control of it. Encompassing two, three, and four dimensional art, the show addresses the paradox from a number of perspectives, including cultural attitudes towards the natural world; the commodification of the natural world; notional worlds inspired by philosopher’s stones and the like; architecture and design informed by nature, or vice versa. The differences between the artists’ approaches and solutions serve as a reminder that society, on a whole, remains ambivalent towards the concept of environment. This is paralleled by the ambiguity in the boundary between the artificial and the natural, with architecture being the most visible and unavoidable demarcation between human society and the natural world.
Decidedly Ambivalent has been intentionally limited to artists working or living in urban or suburban locations. Landscape art is traditionally an urban art form, whereby urban artists would depict idealized scenes of rural areas for urban consumption. Rather than depicting pastoral scenes, this show presents ubiquitous signs of urbanity by commingling architecture and design with landscape.
Anna Mogilevsky composes scenes of tension in her collages of present day suburban and exurban frontiers, where wildlife and humans mutually encroach on each other’s respective territory. Animal adaptation and ingenuity, in response to the modified ecologies of sprawling corporate and industrial parks, result in surreal situations that are often a source of amusement to observing employees and visitors. In Nature Highway that dynamic is dramatically inverted when groups of eco-tourists become the outlandish spectacle themselves as they move, isolated in their vehicles, across the wild landscape.
The photographer and video artist Rob Carter combines photographic imagery with actual soil and seedlings. His work depicts landscape beyond the material, emphasizing its contextual capabilities and depicting it as process, continuously in flux. In his series of photographic works, plants function symbolically as conveyors of aesthetic tradition, colonialism, and context, as well as a metaphor for the ridiculous amounts of energy spent preserving tightly sculpted landscapes. The stop motion animation video Metropolis is an abridged and retouched recount of the history of Charlotte, NC. The piece culminates with the desertification of Charlotte, in a bleak imagined future of water shortages brought on by rapid and careless urban growth. Rather than moralizing reckless development, the ending serves to remind us that, despite our technological and architectural achievements, our own significance is just as fragile as the paper surface the animation was made from.
Informed by and derived from byproducts of our consumer culture, Carin Mincemoyer’s sculptures, drawings, and environments address transformations in the geographical landscape affected by society’s patterns of consumption. Her numerous personally scaled, cleanly designed ecologies in plastic and Styrofoam containers reflect contemporary attitudes towards environment and consumerism. Well contained in their respective receptacles, these ecologies are prevented from achieving any sense of landscape continuity, and ultimately inherit the provisional characteristics of their vessels. Instead of serving as new paradises, this reinforcement of meaning through material communicates that our experience of environment is not exceptional. Desire being the driver of consumerism, works like Paradox confront viewers with the question of how individuals might look to nature to provide us some sense of personal meaning, and how much of that desire we truly understand.
Steven Millar’s sculptures and installations are exercises in investigating how we inhabit space, and how space inhabits us, particularly in suburban communities. Working with data extrapolated from satellite imagery, maps, census and historical sources, Millar recreates American towns and neighborhoods as abstract topologies in serialized shapes, colors, and materials. Suburban Archive is a record of the community of East Islip, NY, and it’s history of growth. Pieces of sculpture resembling rickety shelving emerge from the ceiling, walls, and floors, meandering through the space. Oblique angles and distinct lack of symmetry and standardized organization imparts a felling of rashly impetuous “planning”. Standing in contrast to the dystopic Suburban Archive is Enclave, a site-specific work for Wave Hill, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Millar abstracts the neighborhood into hundreds of colorful laminated plywood blocks representing houses and apartment buildings scattered across equally colorful floating and interlocking planes. The result is a dramatization of landscape that avoids literalism, and provides for an expressive experience of place.
Through interactive sculptures, Lisa di Donato addresses how planning and development can strongly affect the dynamics of a community and societal development. di Donato targets the prelapsarian utopian idealism found in Traditional Neighborhood Development tenants, along with the hubris of architects who believe that society’s salvation can be brought about through design. Actual towns, built or rehabilitated according to the tenants of Traditional Neighborhood Development, are reduced to architectural diagrams and then transcribed onto wooden cubes. Through this distillation, architecture and landscape are revealed as a language, a set of visual signs that are employed to communicate cultural morals, standards, and ideals. These ideals are impossible to realize, and the depiction on blocks suggests the limitations of the any architectural program to truly transform society. The rearrangement of the pieces creates a new social map that is organic and unanticipated, rather than planned. New arrangements reveal an arbitrary number of subjective perspectives that can be explored and adapted as the need arises.
Sonjie Feliciano Solomon’s soft polyester organza terrains escape easy classification as they convey a sense of duality between natural inspiration and human design principles. Carefully planned by industrial design software, the hand sewn architectonic sculptures simultaneously appear as natural landscapes and artificial constructs. It is Feliciano Solomon’s goal that the work first speaks to people purely as visual perception, and then progresses into a curiosity about deconstructing the process. Untitled, a site-specific installation at the Rhode Island School of Design, demonstrates that systematic, computerized design tools are well suited towards capturing and representing with breathless emphemerality the immaterial natural elements of light and air. When given an architectonic and tangible form, light and air are made manifest, raising awareness to their importance in architecture design principals.
Referring to existing locations and landscape model paintings, Patrick J. Campbell explores the connections between current and historic inclinations to create and inhabit notional landscapes. Rockwork landmasses are populated with clusters of folk aesthetic houses and structures, the positions and functions of which are informed by the underlying topography. Faux walls are painted with surrounding landscapes that situate the rockwork as though it were a specimen in a diorama. Deep wood frames complete the illusion of the painting as "cabinet". The dimensional space, trees and applied stones reference the tradition of wunderkammer---16th century European cabinets of curiosity, the precursors to modern day museums. Edges of buildings and structural elements are finished with tiny punched holes, which mimic elements found in frescoes and a number of crafts, while referencing the selection outlines of objects on a computer.
Imagination, science and the natural landscape converge to form a diverse group of fascinating buildings worldwide: architecture dedicated to science. Leah Beeferman’s drawings, sound art, and animations are investigations and invented narratives about real scientific architectures that monitor and explore our landscape and Earth’s atmosphere. These structures are not shelter or infrastructure: they are dynamic structures, active participants, and complex tributes to imagination, and scientific curiosity. Beeferman’s latest series of drawings picture the universe seen by the Eglin FPS-85 radar, used by NASA to track orbital debris. Elgin is anthropomorphized with it’s own desire to project itself into space alongside its radar waves, to experience the clutter first-hand. This reflects a fundamental human drive to seek answers and meaning in nature and the cosmos.
-
Lisa di Donato
April 8, 2009
Decidedly Ambivalent is a group show wherein eight artists address the paradox of society’s desire to experience nature in it’s purist form, while simultaneously desiring expansion into and control of it. Encompassing two, three, and four dimensional art, the show addresses the paradox from a number of perspectives, including cultural attitudes towards the natural world; the commodification of the natural world; notional worlds inspired by philosopher’s stones and the like; architecture and design informed by nature, or vice versa. The differences between the artists’ approaches and solutions serve as a reminder that society, on a whole, remains ambivalent towards the concept of environment. This is paralleled by the ambiguity in the boundary between the artificial and the natural, with architecture being the most visible and unavoidable demarcation between human society and the natural world.
Decidedly Ambivalent has been intentionally limited to artists working or living in urban or suburban locations. Landscape art is traditionally an urban art form, whereby urban artists would depict idealized scenes of rural areas for urban consumption. Rather than depicting pastoral scenes, this show presents ubiquitous signs of urbanity by commingling architecture and design with landscape.
Anna Mogilevsky composes scenes of tension in her collages of present day suburban and exurban frontiers, where wildlife and humans mutually encroach on each other’s respective territory. Animal adaptation and ingenuity, in response to the modified ecologies of sprawling corporate and industrial parks, result in surreal situations that are often a source of amusement to observing employees and visitors. In Nature Highway that dynamic is dramatically inverted when groups of eco-tourists become the outlandish spectacle themselves as they move, isolated in their vehicles, across the wild landscape.
The photographer and video artist Rob Carter combines photographic imagery with actual soil and seedlings. His work depicts landscape beyond the material, emphasizing its contextual capabilities and depicting it as process, continuously in flux. In his series of photographic works, plants function symbolically as conveyors of aesthetic tradition, colonialism, and context, as well as a metaphor for the ridiculous amounts of energy spent preserving tightly sculpted landscapes. The stop motion animation video Metropolis is an abridged and retouched recount of the history of Charlotte, NC. The piece culminates with the desertification of Charlotte, in a bleak imagined future of water shortages brought on by rapid and careless urban growth. Rather than moralizing reckless development, the ending serves to remind us that, despite our technological and architectural achievements, our own significance is just as fragile as the paper surface the animation was made from.
Informed by and derived from byproducts of our consumer culture, Carin Mincemoyer’s sculptures, drawings, and environments address transformations in the geographical landscape affected by society’s patterns of consumption. Her numerous personally scaled, cleanly designed ecologies in plastic and Styrofoam containers reflect contemporary attitudes towards environment and consumerism. Well contained in their respective receptacles, these ecologies are prevented from achieving any sense of landscape continuity, and ultimately inherit the provisional characteristics of their vessels. Instead of serving as new paradises, this reinforcement of meaning through material communicates that our experience of environment is not exceptional. Desire being the driver of consumerism, works like Paradox confront viewers with the question of how individuals might look to nature to provide us some sense of personal meaning, and how much of that desire we truly understand.
Steven Millar’s sculptures and installations are exercises in investigating how we inhabit space, and how space inhabits us, particularly in suburban communities. Working with data extrapolated from satellite imagery, maps, census and historical sources, Millar recreates American towns and neighborhoods as abstract topologies in serialized shapes, colors, and materials. Suburban Archive is a record of the community of East Islip, NY, and it’s history of growth. Pieces of sculpture resembling rickety shelving emerge from the ceiling, walls, and floors, meandering through the space. Oblique angles and distinct lack of symmetry and standardized organization imparts a felling of rashly impetuous “planning”. Standing in contrast to the dystopic Suburban Archive is Enclave, a site-specific work for Wave Hill, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Millar abstracts the neighborhood into hundreds of colorful laminated plywood blocks representing houses and apartment buildings scattered across equally colorful floating and interlocking planes. The result is a dramatization of landscape that avoids literalism, and provides for an expressive experience of place.
Through interactive sculptures, Lisa di Donato addresses how planning and development can strongly affect the dynamics of a community and societal development. di Donato targets the prelapsarian utopian idealism found in Traditional Neighborhood Development tenants, along with the hubris of architects who believe that society’s salvation can be brought about through design. Actual towns, built or rehabilitated according to the tenants of Traditional Neighborhood Development, are reduced to architectural diagrams and then transcribed onto wooden cubes. Through this distillation, architecture and landscape are revealed as a language, a set of visual signs that are employed to communicate cultural morals, standards, and ideals. These ideals are impossible to realize, and the depiction on blocks suggests the limitations of the any architectural program to truly transform society. The rearrangement of the pieces creates a new social map that is organic and unanticipated, rather than planned. New arrangements reveal an arbitrary number of subjective perspectives that can be explored and adapted as the need arises.
Sonjie Feliciano Solomon’s soft polyester organza terrains escape easy classification as they convey a sense of duality between natural inspiration and human design principles. Carefully planned by industrial design software, the hand sewn architectonic sculptures simultaneously appear as natural landscapes and artificial constructs. It is Feliciano Solomon’s goal that the work first speaks to people purely as visual perception, and then progresses into a curiosity about deconstructing the process. Untitled, a site-specific installation at the Rhode Island School of Design, demonstrates that systematic, computerized design tools are well suited towards capturing and representing with breathless emphemerality the immaterial natural elements of light and air. When given an architectonic and tangible form, light and air are made manifest, raising awareness to their importance in architecture design principals.
Referring to existing locations and landscape model paintings, Patrick J. Campbell explores the connections between current and historic inclinations to create and inhabit notional landscapes. Rockwork landmasses are populated with clusters of folk aesthetic houses and structures, the positions and functions of which are informed by the underlying topography. Faux walls are painted with surrounding landscapes that situate the rockwork as though it were a specimen in a diorama. Deep wood frames complete the illusion of the painting as "cabinet". The dimensional space, trees and applied stones reference the tradition of wunderkammer---16th century European cabinets of curiosity, the precursors to modern day museums. Edges of buildings and structural elements are finished with tiny punched holes, which mimic elements found in frescoes and a number of crafts, while referencing the selection outlines of objects on a computer.
Imagination, science and the natural landscape converge to form a diverse group of fascinating buildings worldwide: architecture dedicated to science. Leah Beeferman’s drawings, sound art, and animations are investigations and invented narratives about real scientific architectures that monitor and explore our landscape and Earth’s atmosphere. These structures are not shelter or infrastructure: they are dynamic structures, active participants, and complex tributes to imagination, and scientific curiosity. Beeferman’s latest series of drawings picture the universe seen by the Eglin FPS-85 radar, used by NASA to track orbital debris. Elgin is anthropomorphized with it’s own desire to project itself into space alongside its radar waves, to experience the clutter first-hand. This reflects a fundamental human drive to seek answers and meaning in nature and the cosmos.
-
Lisa di Donato
April 8, 2009
