Near Everywhere
Curated by
Ellen Driscoll
March 27th - May 2nd, 2009
Opening Reception
Friday, March 27, 2009 5-8 pm
artist talk @ 6 pm
Intimate acts of day-to-day living have far flung consequences on climate, on economic disparity, on the shape of the built environment. We rarely, however, imagine what the "butterfly effect" of such local acts might be. Yet in today's world, everything really is getting closer, and smaller--and we end up being "near everywhere". The inundation of the 24-hour news cycle bringing, us this news, can numb us. Instead of creatively interrupting the circuitry of consumption and waste, overload can actually reinforce the status quo. A paradigm shift, in which we can more creatively imagine the metastasizing energy binding local to global, through attention to provocative, and sensuous detail, is suggested by the grouping of works in this exhibition.
Near Everywhere brings together the work of seven artists from four countries, all of whom use a reconfigured poetics of landscape to bring global issues into intimate range through precise use of detail. In Jane Marsching's "Future North", (collaboration with Terreform) the great cities of the world have detached from their original sites due to rising waters, and have all clustered together in a "New North". In Adriane Colburn's "For the Deep" elaborate digitally mapped soundings of the Arctic have been flattened, and painstakingly reconstructed in paper by hand, as a way of touching, and bringing close---the unimaginable shift of this majestic landscape due to climate change. Troy David Oullette's "Detrituscope" is based on research into the 1989 Basil Convention to regulate the transboundary movements of waste from developed to developing countries, with poetic silences to capture innumerable treaty lapses. "Dronecopter" and "Destroyer/Creator," exist as two hypothetical models made from recycled PET bottles, of remote controlled machines for future use to measure ice, and to clear plastic from the Pacific gyre. Deb Todd Wheeler's "from the Biosphere (anonymous)" takes the same overload of daily plastic detritus, and cheerfully creates a botanist's taxonomy of flowers created by volunteers, and one giant floral mandala, a detail from "The Launch" as acts of recuperation and repair. Marguerite Kahrl uses hemp, a plant with a politicized past in the United States, but cultivated and woven by her neighbors in Italy, to sew busts based on Goya's series of witnesses to war entitled Los Caprichos. Vivan Sundaram’s video, "The Brief Ascension of Maryam Hussain" lyrically imagines the ascension of a lowly garbage worker from the streets of Delhi, out of his life as a garbage harvester and sorter, into an untroubled sky "above it all". Ellen Driscoll’s dystopic landscapes, made from harvested plastic water bottles, imagine a future world of flood and drought, in which power structures are inverted, and the McMansion development plot is given over to spontaneous communities of slums.
As an ensemble of works, "Near Everywhere" encourages us to awaken to the daily details around us that remind us that "everything we need is already here".
Featured Artists
Adriane ColburneJane Marsching
Troy David Oullette
Marguerite Kahrl
Deb Todd Wheeler
Vivan Sundaram
Ellen Driscoll