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Installation (Detail) FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 2 by Ellen Driscoll at Smack Mellon / Dumbo Arts Center: Art Under the Bridge Festival 2009 / 20090926.10D.54748.P1.L1.SQ / 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.
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Painting by David Schnell / Galerie EIGEN+ART / The Armory Show 2010 / 20100305.7D.04008.L1 / SML
Image by See-ming Lee ??? SML
David Schnell
The landscape painting of David Schnell reflects the manifestations of a nature, which is getting undercut by our direct, urban surrounding. Thereby architectural pieces capture more or less dominantly the image area of the landscapes. David Schnell uses places such as the cultivated landscape around Leipzig, his domicile and place of study as master student of Prof. Arno Rink, as sources of motive for his pictures.
Within his contemplations of landscape the artist does not evoke real moments of memory. He rather shows an abstract nature which lies beyond any recognizable or concrete experiences. This abstraction manifests itself in the pictorial dissolving of architectural structures and wavering, partly competing vanishing points. Alienating, dissolving, decomposing and subsequent connecting are signs of the artists processual way of working. There are also visual contents which are formed just out of pixels and barcodes. The fluttery status is additionally pointed out by the colouring of the pictures, which ranges from monochrome displays up to prism like light refractions.
The pictures by David Schnell awake the impression of constant speed and destabilisation, which finally also questions the own sense of time.
cgi.eigen-art.com/user-cgi-bin/index.php?article_id=211&a…
Galerie EIGEN+ART Leipzig
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The Armory Show is the United States’ leading art fair devoted to the most important artworks of the 20th and 21st centuries. In its twelve years, the fair has become an international institution. Every March, artists, galleries, collectors, critics and curators from all over the world make New York their destination during Armory Arts Week.
The Armory Show 2010 also features The Armory Show – Modern, specializing in modern and secondary market material on Pier 92. Pier 94 continues to be a venue to premiere new works by living artists. With one ticket, visitors to The Armory Show on March 4–7, 2010 have access to the latest developments in the art world, and to the masterpieces which heralded them.
Piers 92 and 94 on 55th Street and 12th Avenue, NYC
March 4-7, 2010
Dresden_2010_07_ 164
Image by rs-foto
Dresden 2010 | Hochschule für bildende Künste | academy of visual arts
