Some cool visual art images:
Drawings: FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 2 by Ellen Driscoll at Smack Mellon / Dumbo Arts Center: Art Under the Bridge Festival 2009 / 20090926.10D.54765.P1.CC / SML
Image by See-ming Lee ??? SML
www.smackmellon.org
Two Solo Exhibitions
Exhibition dates: September 26 – November 8, 2009
Artists’ reception: Saturday, September 26, 5-8pm
Smack Mellon is pleased to present Ellen Driscoll’s installation FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 2 and Fernando Souto’s photographic series The End of the Trail. The two concurrent solo exhibitions compress layers of time to explore industries and lifestyles that go beyond geographic borders. Composed of thousands of discarded plastic bottles collected by Ellen Driscoll, FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 2 takes a critical look at the environmental and human damage inflicted by the oil and water industries in the last two centuries on regions as diverse as Nigeria and the United States. During extended trips to cattle ranches in the American West, Australia, and Uruguay, Fernando Souto photographed the fading culture of ranchers, creating black-and-white environmental portraits in the tradition of iconic photographers such as Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Both Driscoll and Souto are intimately tied to their craft—painstakingly cutting up salvaged bottles and printing large-scale silver gelatin photographs—asserting a tactile personal connection in their work.
Ellen Driscoll
FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 2
“This installation is a continuation of a multi-year series which explores the dynamics of resource harvesting and consumption. This part of the series focuses on oil and water. Rising at 5:30 AM, I harvest #2 plastic bottles from the recycling bags put out for collection on the streets of Brooklyn. For one hour, one day at a time, I immerse myself in the tidal wave of plastic that engulfs us by collecting as many bottles as I can carry. The sculptural installation for Smack Mellon comprises 2600 bottles transformed into a 28 foot landscape. Constructed solely of harvested #2 plastic, the sculpture collapses three centuries into a ghostly translucent visual fugue in which a nineteenth century trestle bridge plays host to an eighteenth century water-powered mill which spills a twenty-first century flood from its structure. The flow contains North American, Middle Eastern, and African landmasses (sites of oil harvesting and their consumer destination) buoyed by a sea of plastic water molecules. The piece looks back to eighteenth century American industry powered by water, and forward to the oil refineries of the Niger Delta, site of prolonged guerilla warfare against oil corporations and the source of over fifty percent of crude oil for the United States—the oil that produces the plastic within which our privatized water is currently bought and sold.
The wall drawings in the exhibition are based on a close study of the inner workings of an oil refinery. By using huge shifts of scale between the macro and the micro, they depict a dystopic future based on rampant oil consumption. An oil rig shares the horizon with ocean fires and garbage scows, mega shopping malls are abandoned to spontaneous communities of slums, and a refugee camp is inundated by the waters of a melting glacier. The worlds in the drawings are drained of color, but filled with the flux and spillage of a potentially chaotic future.”
Ellen Driscoll is a sculptor whose work includes FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 1 at Frederieke Taylor Gallery, Revenant and Phantom Limb for Nippon Ginko, Hiroshima, Japan, The Loophole of Retreat at the Whitney Museum, Phillip Morris, As Above, So Below for Grand Central Terminal (a suite of 20 mosaic and glass images for the tunnels at 45th, 47th, and 48th Streets), Catching the Drift, a restroom for the Smith College Museum of Art, and Wingspun for the International Arrivals Terminal at Raleigh-Durham airport. Ms. Driscoll has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute at Harvard University, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the LEF Foundation, and Anonymous Was a Woman. Her work is included in major public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Art. She is a Professor of Sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design.
Smack Mellon
92 Plymouth Street @ Washington
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Gallery hours are Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm.
Related SML
+ SML Fine Art (Flickr Group)
+ SML Fine Art (FriendFeed)
+ SML Fine Art (Twitter)
+ SML Flickr Collections: Events
+ SML Flickr Sets: Dumbo Arts Center: Art Under the Bridge Festival 2009
+ SML Flickr Tags: Art
+ SML Pro Blog: Art
Drawings: FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 2 by Ellen Driscoll at Smack Mellon / Dumbo Arts Center: Art Under the Bridge Festival 2009 / 20090926.10D.54767.P1.L1.CC / SML
Image by See-ming Lee ??? SML
www.smackmellon.org
Two Solo Exhibitions
Exhibition dates: September 26 – November 8, 2009
Artists’ reception: Saturday, September 26, 5-8pm
Smack Mellon is pleased to present Ellen Driscoll’s installation FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 2 and Fernando Souto’s photographic series The End of the Trail. The two concurrent solo exhibitions compress layers of time to explore industries and lifestyles that go beyond geographic borders. Composed of thousands of discarded plastic bottles collected by Ellen Driscoll, FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 2 takes a critical look at the environmental and human damage inflicted by the oil and water industries in the last two centuries on regions as diverse as Nigeria and the United States. During extended trips to cattle ranches in the American West, Australia, and Uruguay, Fernando Souto photographed the fading culture of ranchers, creating black-and-white environmental portraits in the tradition of iconic photographers such as Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Both Driscoll and Souto are intimately tied to their craft—painstakingly cutting up salvaged bottles and printing large-scale silver gelatin photographs—asserting a tactile personal connection in their work.
Ellen Driscoll
FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 2
“This installation is a continuation of a multi-year series which explores the dynamics of resource harvesting and consumption. This part of the series focuses on oil and water. Rising at 5:30 AM, I harvest #2 plastic bottles from the recycling bags put out for collection on the streets of Brooklyn. For one hour, one day at a time, I immerse myself in the tidal wave of plastic that engulfs us by collecting as many bottles as I can carry. The sculptural installation for Smack Mellon comprises 2600 bottles transformed into a 28 foot landscape. Constructed solely of harvested #2 plastic, the sculpture collapses three centuries into a ghostly translucent visual fugue in which a nineteenth century trestle bridge plays host to an eighteenth century water-powered mill which spills a twenty-first century flood from its structure. The flow contains North American, Middle Eastern, and African landmasses (sites of oil harvesting and their consumer destination) buoyed by a sea of plastic water molecules. The piece looks back to eighteenth century American industry powered by water, and forward to the oil refineries of the Niger Delta, site of prolonged guerilla warfare against oil corporations and the source of over fifty percent of crude oil for the United States—the oil that produces the plastic within which our privatized water is currently bought and sold.
The wall drawings in the exhibition are based on a close study of the inner workings of an oil refinery. By using huge shifts of scale between the macro and the micro, they depict a dystopic future based on rampant oil consumption. An oil rig shares the horizon with ocean fires and garbage scows, mega shopping malls are abandoned to spontaneous communities of slums, and a refugee camp is inundated by the waters of a melting glacier. The worlds in the drawings are drained of color, but filled with the flux and spillage of a potentially chaotic future.”
Ellen Driscoll is a sculptor whose work includes FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 1 at Frederieke Taylor Gallery, Revenant and Phantom Limb for Nippon Ginko, Hiroshima, Japan, The Loophole of Retreat at the Whitney Museum, Phillip Morris, As Above, So Below for Grand Central Terminal (a suite of 20 mosaic and glass images for the tunnels at 45th, 47th, and 48th Streets), Catching the Drift, a restroom for the Smith College Museum of Art, and Wingspun for the International Arrivals Terminal at Raleigh-Durham airport. Ms. Driscoll has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute at Harvard University, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the LEF Foundation, and Anonymous Was a Woman. Her work is included in major public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Art. She is a Professor of Sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design.
Smack Mellon
92 Plymouth Street @ Washington
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Gallery hours are Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm.
Related SML
+ SML Fine Art (Flickr Group)
+ SML Fine Art (FriendFeed)
+ SML Fine Art (Twitter)
+ SML Flickr Collections: Events
+ SML Flickr Sets: Dumbo Arts Center: Art Under the Bridge Festival 2009
+ SML Flickr Tags: Art
+ SML Pro Blog: Art
Mixed Media Painting Work-in-Progress inside Dean Russo’s Studio / Dumbo Arts Center: Art Under the Bridge Festival 2009 / 20090926.10D.54887.P1.L1 / SML
Image by See-ming Lee ??? SML
Most people like to see the end result, but I prefer seeing the process. I believe that process is an important part, without it you cannot have the result.
Here’s a mixed media painting in progress, seen at Dean Russo’s artist studio during the 13th Annual Art Under the Bridge Festival organized by the Dumbo Arts Center in New York City in 2009.
During our interview, Dean told me about his entire process in creating his mixed media paintings, as long as I don’t record it nor write it down. As such, I cannot really write about it either but all I can say is that I find it very interesting — that an artist workflow is not far from that from designers (my primary profession).
Dean Russo on the Web
+ deanrusso.com
+ facebook.com/deanrussoart
+ www.deanrussoart.etsy.com
13th annual D.U.M.B.O. Art Under the Bridge Festival® (Sept 25 to Sept 27, 2009)
www.dumboartfestival.org/press_release.html
The three-day multi-site neighborhood-wide event is a one-of-a-kind art happening: where serendipity meets the haphazard and where the unpredictable, spontaneous and downright weird thrive. The now teenage D.U.M.B.O. Art Under the Bridge Festival® presents touchable, accessible, and interactive art, on a scale that makes it the nation’s largest urban forum for experimental art.
Art Under the Bridge is an opportunity for young artists to use any medium imaginable to create temporary projects on-the-spot everywhere and anywhere, completely transforming the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, New York, into a vibrant platform for self-expression. In addition to the 80+ projects throughout the historical post-industrial waterfront span, visitors can tour local artists’ studios or check out the indoor video_dumbo, a non-stop program of cutting-edge video art from New York City and around the world.
The Dumbo Arts Center (DAC) has been the exclusive producer of the D.U.M.B.O Art Under the Bridge Festival® since 1997. DAC is a big impact, small non-profit, that in addition to its year-round gallery exhibitions, is committed to preserving Dumbo as a site in New York City where emerging visual artists can experiment in the public domain, while having unprecedented freedom and access to normally off-limit locations.
www.dumboartscenter.org
www.dumboartfestival.org
www.video_dumbo.org
Related SML
+ SML Fine Art (Flickr Group)
+ SML Flickr Collections: Events
+ SML Flickr Sets: Art
+ SML Flickr Sets: Dumbo Arts Center: Art Under the Bridge Festival 2009
+ SML Flickr Tags: Art
+ SML Pro Blog: Art
