Here & There: Seeing New Ground: Opening Exhibition of LAND/ART

Laurie Anderson
Hidden Inside Mountains
2005, video still

516 ARTS announces Here & There: Seeing New Ground, the first exhibition for LAND/ART, opening Friday, June 5, 5-8pm. LAND/ART is a large-scale collaboration organized by 516 ARTS, exploring land-based and environmental art, involving over 25 organizations during 6 months in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Mountainair. Here & There: Seeing New Ground features contemporary artists examining the landscape from perspectives that are both visual and cultural, including explorations of Native American film, as well as Native and non-Native artists who subvert landscape perspective to examine issues of the environment and human beings’ relationship with nature. Through photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, print, film and installation, these artists offer interpretations of the land and landscape both within and without human interaction. The exhibition is curated by 516 ARTS with experimental film artist Marcella Ernest and Nancy Marie Mithlo, Assistant Professor of Art History and American Indian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The exhibition catalog features an essay by Nancy Marie Mithlo inspired by the film Intrepid Shadows by Alfred Clah (1966), on view throughout the exhibition. Learn more on the LAND/ART website.

Shelley Niro
Tree
2006, film still

Zach Meisner at Open Space (LAND/ART)

image of PAINTED JETTY JACKS by Zach Meisner at Open Space as part of LAND/ART

Located in the south-east side of the River Loop Trail in the Bosque, Meisner will use organic milk-based paints that are environmentally safe (VOC free) and designed to bio-degrade to re-color the existing Jetty Jacks, altering the appearance of their presence in the Bosque and the viewer's perception of the Jacks in this environment.

For more information contact:
Joshua Willis
Open Space Coordinator
http://www.cabq.gov/openspace/visitorcenter.html

Land Arts of the American West book review in Santa Fe Reporter

Zane Fischer reviews Bill Gilbert's and Chris Taylor's new book, Land Arts of the American West, and the LAND/ART project in the Santa Fe Reporter ("Finally Landing, A new book and planned events bring land art to the level it deserves").

Green Platform

GREEN PLATFORM

Art Ecology Sustainability

24 April – 19 July 2009

curated by Lorenzo Giusti and Valentina Gensini

at the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina
Palazzo Strozzi, piazza Strozzi, Florence, Italy

Artists

Alterazioni Video, Amy Balkin, Andrea Caretto e Raffaella Spagna, Michele Dantini, Ettore Favini, Futurefarmers, Tue Greenfort, Henrik Håkansson, Katie Holten, Dave Hullfish Bailey, Christiane Löhr, Dacia Manto, Lucy + Jorge Orta, Julian Rosefeldt, Carlotta Ruggieri, Superflex, Nicola Toffolini, Nikola Uzunovski

curated by Lorenzo Giusti and Valentina Gensini

Green Platform examines, in an interdisciplinary fashion, the issue of the environment in the dual sense of a crisis in our thermo-industrial society based on non-renewable sources of energy and of an ecological crisis caused by pollution and by the worrying overheating of our planet. The problem of ecology is analyzed and understood in its myriad philosophical, psychological, environmental, economic and social implications. Green Platform defines ecology not merely as a natural science but as a science of interrelations, confines and cross-border osmosis, the focal link in the partnership between nature and culture.

The exhibition presents a series of works by international artists who, acting in the wake of the pioneer experience that developed in the avant-garde movements of the Sixties and Seventies, address the issues of the environment, ecology and sustainability.

Green Platform offers various kinds of active experience: workshops with artists and other players in the environmental associations and NGO's, a series of lectures with experts in various relevant disciplines and the screening of videos and documentaries on environment-related issues.

Contemporary Tate - May 2009 - Richard Long

This from Chris Taylor and the Land Arts Listserv:

click to view larger image

For details, see the Tate website.

JACKRABBIT HOMESTEAD

Artist Kim Stringfellow has announced her new project JACKRABBIT HOMESTEAD.

The project, "is a forthcoming book and web-based multimedia presentation featuring a downloadable car audio tour exploring the cultural legacy of the Small Tract Act in Southern California's Morongo Basin region near Joshua Tree National Park. Stories from this underrepresented regional history are told through the voices of local residents, historians, and area artists—many of whom reside in reclaimed historic cabins and use the structures as inspiration for their creative work."

Check out and attend the May 22nd event at Farmlab

LAND/ART event guide now available

The full six month guide to LAND/ART related events is now available! Download it here.

Cynthia Hooper Lecture @ Sea and Space Explorations

CESPT, 2009, color video, running time: 7 minutes

Chris Taylor (Land Arts of the American West Listserv) sends word of Cynthia Hooper's lecture this Sunday, May 17 @ 7:30, at Sea and Space Explorations in Los Angeles. Hooper's lecture is in conjunction with Nicole Antebi's and May Jong's exhibition Through the Looking Glass: The Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Hooper will also screen a 7 minute video entitled CESPT:

The two rivers that serve the city of Tijuana, Mexico—the inbound Colorado and the outbound Tijuana—are two heavily litigated, politically contentious, courageously border-defying bodies of water. Artificially yoked by a 118-mile long aqueduct that spans northern Baja’s vast desert, these two conjoined entities labor to hydrate this rapidly and perilously expanding metropolis. This video investigates one particular segment of this vast, transnational trajectory of water—from its storage at the city’s picturesque reservoir, to its transport, treatment, remediation, and ultimate release into the Pacific Ocean.

We've embedded CESPT below for those of us who can't make the screening. You can also view it and several of Hooper's other works on Vimeo.

CESPT from Cynthia Hooper on Vimeo.

Maya Lin's Monumental Earthwork: Wavefield at Storm King Art Center

Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson

A monumental work of land art or "earth art", as New York Times reviewer Holland Cotter calls it, was unveiled this weekend at Storm King Art Center, just outside of New York City in Mountainville. Maya Lin's “Storm King Wavefield” is the third and last in her series of wavefields. It is also the largest: a 240,000 square feet earthwork taking up four acres, with heights of 15 feet.

Storm King says this about the work:

. . . the largest site-specific earthwork created to date by acclaimed artist and environmentalist Maya Lin. Occupying an eleven-acre site that was a gravel pit until Ms. Lin reclaimed it for the work, the ambitious Storm King Wavefield comprises seven rows—each over 300 feet long—of carefully scaled, undulating hills that give the appearance of ocean waves.

Artists + Environments web exhibition launch

Today smudge studio launched a web exhibition of its recently completed project entitled: Artists + Environments: Generative Practices and Conversations.

The project began with a three-week long web event in March, 2009. smudge studio orchestrated a collaboration among 16 artists, art educators, museum educators, and media designers whose works address natural, built, and virtual environments.

Collaborators used a blog to experiment with and creatively respond to five gestures (drawn from the Walker Art Center's "Elements and Principles of Today's Art') that shape contemporary art: hybridity, time, space, performance, and appropriation. Each week, moderators kicked off the conversation with provocations. Moderators included Bill L. Fox, Susan Rotilie, and Colin Robertson.

On March 26, 2009, we took the results to graduate students in Penn State’s School of Visual Arts “Web 2.0 Pedagogies” class, taught by Karen Keifer-Boyd. There, Karen and her students helped design the web exhibition during a charrette facilitated by smudge.

You can view the project's press release and description here.

You can experience the exhibition, along with documentation of the design charrette, on ExtremeMediaStudies.org (click on "web exhibitions" or "web exhibition: generative conversations"). You'll find video, interactive image and text "echoes," extracted themes, and contextualized text excerpts from the conversation's flow.

We invite you to creatively appropriate the web exhibition for your needs as artists, teachers, and museum educators. Please pass it along. Let us know what you think and how it's taken up.

Photocartographies

On May 16, Photocartographies: Tattered Fragments of the Map opens at g727 in Los Angeles.

Photocartographies, organized by independent curators Adam Katz and Brian Rosa, is self-described as, "a curatorial project materializing in multiple forms: an exhibition, a publication and a series of public programs."

The map in this project is taken up, "not a representation so much as a system of propositions. This project reveals mapping itself as a generative process of knowledge creation, a liberatory method for re-imagining and re-imaging our world, its built and natural environments, and the relationship between space and place."

Check out the tatteredfragments.info website for more information about the exhibition, related events, artworks for sale, and book (including an essay by Bill Fox).

Land Arts Listserv: Remote Studio at the Artemis Institute

A donation for scholarships at the Artemis Institutes's Remote Studio was announced on the Listserv this week. Visit Artemis for more info about application guidelines and calls for projects.

The content of this post is reproduced from the Land Arts of the American West listserv with permission.
To join the list, visit the listserve webpage here.

Land Arts Listserv: Tacita Dean, JG Ballard and the Spiral Jetty

Spiral Jetty, a 1970 earthworks sculpture of a 1,500 foot long spiral made of 6,650 tons of black basalt. Photograph: George Steinmetz/Corbis

Chris Taylor sent out a notice this week (on the Land Arts Listserv) of Tacita Dean's recent article marking the passing of JG Ballard. The piece reflects upon Dean and Ballard's shared interest in Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. The original article can be accessed in the Guardian.

The content of this post is reproduced from the Land Arts of the American West listserv with permission.
To join the list, visit the listserve webpage here.

Matters of Perspective: Freeman Dyson in the Times

Eugene Richards for The New York Times

On March 25th, the New York Times Magazine ran an extended story about physicist Freeman Dyson. The media outlet has taken note of the scientist's stance on a contemporary topic that looms large in relation to the emerging field of art + environment - global warming. Dr. Dyson has a unique take on the subject, and is no stranger to being controversially and influentially intertwined with issues affecting landscape and land use. Most people are familiar with two commonly reproduced, and rather mesmerizing, quotations of his that were spoken and written (several decades ago) in response to another force that greatly influences the contemporary landscapes of the United States - nuclear weapon development and testing. These quotes can be found in John McPhee's Basin and Range, Rebecca Solnit's Savage Dreams, and Trevor Paglen's recent Blank Spots on the Map.

From John Else's Day After Trinity:
"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

From his own, Disturbing the Universe, in response to visiting Jackass Flat in 1959.
"It is a soul-shattering silence. You hold your breath and hear absolutely nothing. No rustling of leaves in the wind, no rumbling of distant traffic, no chatter of birds or insects or children. You are alone with God in that silence. There in that white, flat silence I began to feel a slight sense of shame for what we were proposing to do. Did we really intend to invade this silence with our trucks and bulldozers and after a few years leave it a radioactive junkyard?"

Comments posted in response to the Times article appear here.