Chelsea Art Museum Artists (3)
Tuesday to Saturday 11AM to 6PM
Thursday 11AM to 8PM
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PAST EXHIBITION
Nature Interrupted
July 5, 2008—September 6, 2008
Press Release
The Chelsea Art Museum, Home of the Miotte Foundation, is proud to present Nature Interrupted. The urgent and imperative message to restore health to the environment must be conveyed in every possible form of media and communication, and more so in art, for it is one of the most powerful languages humans have ever created.
Even in prehistoric times, peoples sought to transform the environment, through their cave paintings, megaliths and stone circles--seeking ways to connect with the force of nature. From those early beginnings, artists have been profoundly influenced by the images, colors, patterns, structures and systems of nature around them.
At various times of turbulent change in our history, such as in Hellenistic Greece, medieval Japan, and Europe at the time of the great political and industrial revolutions, new art forms have emerged in order to address the changing relationship between nature and society.
From the turn of the new millennium, world concern over environmental issues such as pollution and global warming, species depletion, new genetic technologies, sustainability and global pandemics has increased. Artists, in turn, are responding by answering collective cultural needs and developing active and practical roles in environmental and social issues.
In this exhibition, Nature Interrupted, eleven artists show very diverse aspects of their concern. They may focus on a rare species in danger of extinction, such as the eagle in Osmo Rauhala’s captivating video images, or the preservation of trees threatened by decease, as in Joan Backes’s paintings of tree bark, which could, in the future, become a points of reference to a species no longer in existence. Another metaphor is Katie Holten’s artificial tree made of refuse such as recycled cardboard, wire, newspaper, and black tape. The emblem of a tree in distress is a perfect symbol for the environmental crisis we are experiencing. Anya Gallaccio’s installation “like we've never met” includes a series of doors with flowers pressed behind glass. Over the course of the exhibition, the flowers blacken and decay, highlighting the opposition between the instability of the natural materials and the permanence of the cast objects. |
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