Frank McEntire Installation, Harris Fine Arts Center
Above: Frank McEntire Installation
Bird Nest
https://www.boredpanda.com/bird-nesting-styles-ferris-jabr/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
Bird Nest
https://www.boredpanda.com/bird-nesting-styles-ferris-jabr/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
Ideas about wilderness, nature, and sustainability are significant parts of artistic traditions in every culture. However, these ideas are also constantly evolving and fraught with paradox. Popular visual culture is particularly influential in conveying the ideas, stories, and myths about nature that animate discussions about environmental responsibility, ecology, and sustainability.
Recurring Themes: Survival, Contagion, Pandemic, Mother Nature, Evolution, Entropy, Wilderness, Ecology, Sustainability, Romanticism, Landscape,
How does culture construct “nature” and our relationships to “nature”?
Nature does not have a voice of its own. The institutions that claim to speak for nature—natural-history museums, television documentaries, scientific journals, popular magazines, conservation organizations—all declare to represent the official story of what gets to stand for nature… I am struggling to untangle how ideology taints the representation of nature—to understand what assumptions, values, desires, fears, and hopes drive these depictions. I want to critically understand the various agendas embedded in these official stories. I think understanding this history of ideas is key to comprehending how we in the West have evolved a suicidal relationship to the natural world. (Mark Dion, Art 21)
Recurring Themes: Survival, Contagion, Pandemic, Mother Nature, Evolution, Entropy, Wilderness, Ecology, Sustainability, Romanticism, Landscape,
How does culture construct “nature” and our relationships to “nature”?
Nature does not have a voice of its own. The institutions that claim to speak for nature—natural-history museums, television documentaries, scientific journals, popular magazines, conservation organizations—all declare to represent the official story of what gets to stand for nature… I am struggling to untangle how ideology taints the representation of nature—to understand what assumptions, values, desires, fears, and hopes drive these depictions. I want to critically understand the various agendas embedded in these official stories. I think understanding this history of ideas is key to comprehending how we in the West have evolved a suicidal relationship to the natural world. (Mark Dion, Art 21)
Mark Dion’s artistic practice is instructive in how, as an amateur, he adopts the roles of naturalist, scientist, ecologist, and archaeologist. He often performs the mythic figure of the naturalist adventurer and archaeologist. His work looks like a scientific or archaeological enterprise. But it is not science, it is a surrealistic dream of science. “I want to acknowledge or even enhance the uncanniness of nature—the wonder of the vast complexity and diversity within a natural system. I think the job of an artist is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception, prejudice, and convention” (Dion n.d.). Collections of objects become a kind of text that can reveal the cultural layering and assumptions we make about nature.
Collecting, Collections and the art of collecting. https://art21.org/read/cultivating-collections/
Young kids are natural collectors, but they don’t always realize that, with clear intention, a collection can become a work of art. I talk about collections with my students because I want them to understand that artists can use a collection of objects as a way to make art, but artists can also create a collection of objects as a way to make art. Discussing contemporary artists who do both of these things can help to illustrate these ideas and start discussions about collections and art.“When students begin to collect, they also begin to curate.”
When discussing his work during the Art21 Extended Play segment, “Collecting,” Theaster Gates speaks about how collections are like “this little time capsule of things that were important to someone” and how he is “looking for the personality of people within their collections.” Even though the interests and aesthetics of my young students are often vastly different from my own, placing value on and honoring those interests are important ways to show respect to their developing creative personalities. When I share the work of contemporary artists with my students, I hope that they will be engaged and inspired and will recognize some of the artistic behaviors that we practice in our studio, all the while broadening their understanding of what art can be.
“Having collections activates the imaginations of young artists.”
Some of the ordinary objects that Gates had collected and arranged—archiving the contents of a hardware store and binding issues of Jet and Essence magazines—took my students by surprise, which got us thinking: Why do people collect things? Do we have multiple objects in our studio that we can arrange in creative ways? What objects can we collect from home and bring into our studio? What makes some objects more interesting than others? When students begin to collect, they also begin to curate.
Young kids are natural collectors, but they don’t always realize that, with clear intention, a collection can become a work of art. I talk about collections with my students because I want them to understand that artists can use a collection of objects as a way to make art, but artists can also create a collection of objects as a way to make art. Discussing contemporary artists who do both of these things can help to illustrate these ideas and start discussions about collections and art.“When students begin to collect, they also begin to curate.”
When discussing his work during the Art21 Extended Play segment, “Collecting,” Theaster Gates speaks about how collections are like “this little time capsule of things that were important to someone” and how he is “looking for the personality of people within their collections.” Even though the interests and aesthetics of my young students are often vastly different from my own, placing value on and honoring those interests are important ways to show respect to their developing creative personalities. When I share the work of contemporary artists with my students, I hope that they will be engaged and inspired and will recognize some of the artistic behaviors that we practice in our studio, all the while broadening their understanding of what art can be.
“Having collections activates the imaginations of young artists.”
Some of the ordinary objects that Gates had collected and arranged—archiving the contents of a hardware store and binding issues of Jet and Essence magazines—took my students by surprise, which got us thinking: Why do people collect things? Do we have multiple objects in our studio that we can arrange in creative ways? What objects can we collect from home and bring into our studio? What makes some objects more interesting than others? When students begin to collect, they also begin to curate.
Ecology, Agnes Denes, Robert Adams, Mary Oliver..."in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and wildness come the tonics and barks that brace mankind" (Thoreau).
Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking
Richard Long
Andy Goldsworthy:
https://www.boredpanda.com/land-art-andy-goldsworthy/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
https://www.boredpanda.com/land-art-andy-goldsworthy/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
An underlying tension in Adams’s body of work is the contradiction between landscapes visibly transformed or scarred by human presence and the inherent beauty of light and land rendered by the camera. Adams’s complex photographs expose the hollowness of the nineteenth-century American doctrine of Manifest Destiny, expressing somber indignation at the idea (still alive in the twenty-first century) that the West represents an unlimited natural resource for human consumption. But his work also conveys hope that change can be effected, and it speaks with joy of what remains glorious in the West..."Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don’t think you can get along without it. Beauty is the confirmation of meaning in life. It is the thing that seems invulnerable, in some cases, to our touch. And who would want to do without beauty?"
Agnes Denes: My decision to bring sheep into the Academy gardens reflects my environmental concerns and calls attention to some of our misplaced priorities. When pitted against the pristine environment of the Academy the sheep were intended to create a strong paradox, usually inherent in my art. My work breaks through the boundaries of art and deals with ecological, cultural and social issues. I map human evolution, create social structures and metaphors for our time. These philosophy and science based, large-scale environmental projects range between individual creation and social consciousness. I plant forests on mined land, in soil destroyed by resource extraction, to be kept alive for centuries, and plant fields of grain in the heart of megacities. These works establish a non-ego based art form that benefit future generations with a meaningful legacy...Planting and harvesting a field of wheat on land worth $4.5 billion created a powerful paradox. Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept; it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns. It called attention to our misplaced priorities. The harvested grain traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called "The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger"
Brandon Ballengeé
For more than a decade, a central praxis of my primary biological research and subject of my artworks has been the declines and potential causes of deformities among amphibian populations.
For more than a decade, a central praxis of my primary biological research and subject of my artworks has been the declines and potential causes of deformities among amphibian populations.
Mary Mattingly: How can art make a difference in the world?
What is ecology? Ecology is about the relationships and interdependence of all living things their environment. Protecting nature became a scientific necessity as well as a sentimental virtue. Man had a responsibility to the rest of the natural world that went beyond being its chief consumer. Wilderness and nature were seen as sources of creativity and intellectual diversity. Robert Adams: Light is at the center of why and how one makes pictures. Natural light has a mysterious quality that is always perfect…what distinguishes a landscape painter is an especially intense emotional response to light… If you haven’t loved a tree enough (if not to hug it, at least to want to walk up to it and touch it, as if you’re touching a profound mystery) if that experience has eluded you-I feel bad for you because you’re not going to live a happy life.
Wendell Berry, Christianity, and the non-human world: We do not own the world. We are deficient in our understanding of creation, it was all made by Him, and he approved it. The sense of the holiness of life is not compatible with an exploitive economy. By economy I mean the ways of human house-keeping, within the household of nature. What sort of economy would be responsible to the holiness of life? Christians are going to have to find workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying our world…the bible as an outdoor book….Honoring nature as a great mystery and power, an indispensable teacher, as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. The entire creation is understood as holy.
Wendell Berry, Christianity, and the non-human world: We do not own the world. We are deficient in our understanding of creation, it was all made by Him, and he approved it. The sense of the holiness of life is not compatible with an exploitive economy. By economy I mean the ways of human house-keeping, within the household of nature. What sort of economy would be responsible to the holiness of life? Christians are going to have to find workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying our world…the bible as an outdoor book….Honoring nature as a great mystery and power, an indispensable teacher, as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. The entire creation is understood as holy.
An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960. Lê fled Vietnam with her family as a teenager in 1975, the final year of the war, eventually settling in the United States as a political refugee
Minerva Cuevas
https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/minerva-cuevas-bridging-borders-short/
Minerva Cuevas was born in Mexico City in 1975. She’s a conceptual and socially-engaged artist who creates sculptural installations and paintings in response to politically-charged events, such as the tension between world starvation and capitalistic excess. Cuevas documents community protests in a cartography of resistance while also creating mini-sabotages—altering grocery store bar codes and manufacturing student identity cards—as part of her non-profit Mejor Vida Corp / Better Life Corporation.
https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/minerva-cuevas-bridging-borders-short/
Minerva Cuevas was born in Mexico City in 1975. She’s a conceptual and socially-engaged artist who creates sculptural installations and paintings in response to politically-charged events, such as the tension between world starvation and capitalistic excess. Cuevas documents community protests in a cartography of resistance while also creating mini-sabotages—altering grocery store bar codes and manufacturing student identity cards—as part of her non-profit Mejor Vida Corp / Better Life Corporation.
Wolfgang Laib was born in 1950 in Metzingen, Germany. Inspired by the teachings of the ancient Taoist philosopher Laozi, by the modern artist Brancusi, and the legacy of formative life experiences with his family in Germany and India, Laib creates sculptures that seem to connect that past and present, the ephemeral and the eternal. Working with perishable organic materials (pollen, milk, wood, and rice) as well as durable ones that include granite, marble, and brass, he grounds his work by his choice of forms—squares, ziggurats, and ships, among others. His painstaking collection of pollen from the wildflowers and bushes that grow in the fields near his home is integral to the process of creating work in which pollen is his medium. This he has done each year over the course of three decades. Laib’s attention to human scale, duration of time, and his choice of materials give his work the power to transport us to expected realms of memory, sensory pleasure, and contemplation.
Although often mistaken for accumulations of found objects, Leonardo Drew’s sculptures are instead made of “brand new stuff”—materials such as wood, rusted iron, cotton, paper, and mud—that he intentionally subjects to processes of weathering, burning, oxidation, and decay. Whether jutting out from a wall or traversing rooms as freestanding installations, his pieces challenge the architecture of the space in which they’re shown. Never content with work that comes easily, Drew constantly reaches beyond “what’s comfortable” and charts a course of daily investigation, never knowing what the work will be about but letting it find its way, and asking, “What if….”
https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s7/leonardo-drew-in-investigation-segment/
Although often mistaken for accumulations of found objects, Leonardo Drew’s sculptures are instead made of “brand new stuff”—materials such as wood, rusted iron, cotton, paper, and mud—that he intentionally subjects to processes of weathering, burning, oxidation, and decay. Whether jutting out from a wall or traversing rooms as freestanding installations, his pieces challenge the architecture of the space in which they’re shown. Never content with work that comes easily, Drew constantly reaches beyond “what’s comfortable” and charts a course of daily investigation, never knowing what the work will be about but letting it find its way, and asking, “What if….”
https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s7/leonardo-drew-in-investigation-segment/