Exhibition Dates: September 7-29, 2019
Opening reception: Saturday, September 14th, 7-10pm
Art Talk: Saturday, September 28, 1-3pm
In Life Forms, Laura Stack explores the awe-inspiring complexity of the natural world and the underlying forces that create it. The content of her work stems from a fascination with developmental biology and the contradiction that living things can now embody synthetic elements. The very definition of what constitutes "life" has become more elusive due to developments in synthetic biology. Stack contemplates this paradigm shift by painting an imagined view of a “new natural.”
In her painting and collage process, she imagines otherworldly living forms and environments and envisions a fluid spatial world with its own laws of physics. Fractal patterns, fungi, and marine life inspire the imagery as well as geologic processes such as lava flow and mineral formations. Stack’s work implies a frozen moment in the process of becoming, evolving towards an amalgam of something both natural and artificial.
Laura’s exhibit features a large-scale vinyl wall piece that is a collaboration with artist Melissa Breitenfeldt.
With Shifting Baseline Syndrome, Eleanor McGough brings variations of her hand cut paper insects to the gallery along with paintings from her ongoing series of vanishing landscapes.
Shifting Baseline Syndrome is a term used to describe the shifting threshold for our willingness to accept increasing levels of environmental degradation as normal. Recent studies show rapid insect population decline. Once thought ubiquitous, flying insect populations now appear to be dwindling dramatically. This has broad implications for the delicate balance of the food chain, and the health of our planet.
The idea that insects are bio-indicators of ecosystem health fascinates McGough. Her work seeks to articulate the critical role these diminutive and ephemeral messengers play in the structure of life, and how their mind-boggling variety captivates our imagination. Elaborating on the astonishing variety of insect forms with her own interpretive variations, McGough uses impermanent materials to convey the fragile, and temporary nature of these subjects.
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